The Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) filters certain Web sites, and can track which Web sites students visit on school computers.

PAUSD originally agreed not to block sites. "There was a [School] Board decision not to filter," Technology Coordinator and Science Instructional Supervisor Lettie Weinmann said. "They did not believe that filtering would help students to learn how to make good choices."

However, two years ago, the district decided to filter some Web sites in order to receive federal funding. "There's something called e-rate funding which pays a significant amount of money for the technology at our schools," Weinmann said. "We had to agree to filter these pornographic sites in order to get the federal fund." PAUSD also decided to filter because of concerned elementary school parents. "Kids would go to inappropriate Web sites accidentally," Director of Education Technology for PAUSD Marie Scigliano said.

The district hired Lightspeed Systems to set up a filtering system. "The company keeps the system up-to-date," Weinmann said. The system puts sites that are deemed inappropriate on the black list and sites that are considered appropriate for students on the white list. The system checks gray list sites regularly to make sure that they don't contain any inappropriate content.

According to Scigliano, pornographic sites are among those filtered out.

But there are flaws to the program, Weinmann said, because the system mostly checks word content. Sites that have appropriate content but inappropriate graphics can take up to a week to be filtered.

Occasionally, a teacher or student requests access to one of the filtered sites. When this happens, the district's system administrator puts the site on the white list. "Anything that [the administrator] feels is questionable goes to me," Weinmann said. The district can also designate specific sites for the black list.

However, some students have been able to get around the district filtering system. "You can use some proxy sites that aren't blocked," an anonymous sophomore said. "[The district doesn't] block all of them. They block most of them." By using proxy sites to change the IP address of the user, people can get around the filtering system. "You can also download something such as Tor [another proxy site], onto your Flash drive and then run it [on a school computer]," the student said. "Google cache sites also work." This can be done on all browsers.

Though it doesn't do so often, the district can trace which students visit which sites. "There is a record of where students go," Weinmann said. "Servers at the district record every site that's hit. If they put in the effort, they may trace the site to the computer and they can track back to you." At present, it is difficult for the district to determine which student visited the site, but the district is moving towards a system with a single password login, Weinmann said.

In the past, Gunn has successfully tracked down students who have used the school computers for inappropriate purpose. One student created viruses on the computers; another stole a credit card number with a hacker mag, and a third sent threatening e-mails to another person. "We only track down sites because of law enforcement," Weinmann said.

Gunn also redirects some Web sites on parts of the campus. Gunn has blocked certain sites on computers in Focus on Success and special education classes that distract students from their work.