The "Load" Down on the School Website
By Kevin Jones
Monday, December 4th, students walked into school ready to kill time before class started on the school computers only to find that nearly every website was blocked. At Suffern High School students and teachers alike are used to being unable to access sites like YouTube or Facebook but sites like Wikipedia and the CNN News website were now blocked. To see why our school had been cut off from the World Wide Web, I went to the highest authority in the building, Acting Principal Breen. According to Mr. Breen, the school's original filter was controlled by BOCES. "What the school wants to do is to take control of the filter so that teachers who want to show something to students on YouTube will be able to. The new system will only block a particular URL as opposed to the entire site, allowing teachers to access beneficial sites and enabling students from accessing things that they shouldn't." Unfortunately, during instalation, the programmers didn't realize that they had to create a list before turning on the program. Needless to say, as soon the error was noticed, it was already being rectified and the brief period where we felt disconnected was over in a matter of hours.
