A number of Collier County, Florida, students were caught not just accessing porn on school computers but posting nudes of themselves, according to several southwest Florida news reports.
The students reportedly posted to a weblog made to look like a normal blog where they could complain about schoolwork and talk about teen romance and similar subjects, but the blog turned out to feature sex talk and nude pictures.
Parents complained to school officials when they learned about the blog, the reports stated, and six Palmetto Ridge students were disciplined over the blog. Fort Myers WBBH television news reported school officials saying the blog eluded school computer filters.
"It was a site not picked up by the filter at that point," Collier County School District official Russell Clukey told the station. "If it sees inappropriate material going by, it reaches out and grabs that and sends access denied. It's 99 percent accurate. Nothing is 100 percent foolproof. Some things will get through occasionally."
The incident may not be an isolated one. WBBH said Collier County claims that less than 10 cases a year of students beating the school Internet filters, while several other teens posting to the blog were from Fort Myers in Lee County.
But southwest Florida is far from the only region in the U.S. that frets over students trying to beat school computer filters. The problem has been public since at least 1999, when a Clayton Valley High School (California) student was caught visiting an adult website, after a teacher who noticed him spending long hours getting little work done on school computers checked history files.
And it isn't only students finding the porn that vexes school districts. At the same time the southwest Florida revelations emerged, a Bemidji (Minnesota) High School teacher, Steven Strasser, was charged with possessing child porn on his school computer, after a district worker fixing the machine found the material.
Days earlier, a Wilton, Iowa, industrial arts teacher was offered the choice between quitting or getting fired after he was accused of using a school computer to access adult sites. Steve Shirk has since vowed to fight the accusations, telling reporters he could account for his whereabouts when he was said to be accessing those sites.
A similar incident occurred at Alvin (Texas) Junior High School, where a substitute teacher was fired last week when a student caught him looking at online porn during class. The student told a reporter that she told another teacher who advised her to tell her counselor.
"I was, like, 'Oh, that's disgusting,'" the unidentified girl told the reporter. "I don't want a teacher like that in my school because how do you know he wouldn't try to do something to other girls or students at the school?"
