Here's part of the policy on what can be put on the World Wide Web at
Community High.  Are they paranoid or what?

Content Guidelines

Students will be allowed to produce materials for electronic publication
on the Internet. Network administrators will monitor these materials to
ensure compliance with content standards. The content of student materials
is constrained by the following rest rictions: 

1. No personal information about a student will be allowed. This includes
home telephone numbers and addresses as well as information regarding the
specific location of any student at any given time. 

2. All student works must be signed with the student's full name.

3. Individuals in pictures, movies or sound recordings may be identified
only by initials (e.g. JQP for John Q. Public). Absolutely no first or
last names may appear in reference to individuals in any image, movie, or
sound recording. 

4. No text, image, movie or sound that contains pornography, profanity,
obscenity, or language that offends or tends to degrade others will be
allowed. 

15 responses total.

#1 appears to be aimed at ensuring that the resources are used as intended.
Yes, it's restrictive, but not unreasonable. #3 is perplexing though.
It might be interesting to hear from those who made up these restrictions
what the purpose of having them was. It may have stemmed from fear of
liability, or maybe just a lack of understanding. #4 makes sense, though.

Restriction #3 w.r.t. pictures isn't exercised by other journalistic
media (though they obtain permission to use names). Are they worried
about asking for permission to give the names of minors, in a medium that
has a taint of ...whatever...?

Maybe #3 is aimed at reducing liability if anyone ended up getting preyed
upon by baddies out in networld.  

        Apparrently they are worried about people finding Community
students on the Net and deciding to kidnap or molest them.  It seems like
a pretty stupid fear to me, and I would have argued very hard against it
had they allowed student input.  As it was, a group at the University just
handed it to some administrators and told them that it was a reasonable
policy and that they had no choice but to approve it if they wanted to
keep the students safe, or something like that.  It was presented as a
done deal even while it was a work in progress, and it was made almost
impossible to get any information about the process. 
        So far the attitude from those of us on the Web team has generally
been that anything goes as long as nobody says anything, and that if
somebody does complain we can decide what to do then.  We've also found
another way around it that we have been using to some extent.  Some of us
have access to put web pages on other servers which aren't covered by the
Community policy, so there are a few things that don't comply with the
policy (students' home pages so far, but a graphical version of our school
paper will soon join them) which live on computers some of us have access
to through work, with links to the Community home page. 

I think you missed the parental permission angle. We've always been
asked if a picture (and name) can be used of our daughter, when her
picture is taken for media publication. They have *have* to do that.
It would apply just as well to electronic media, I would think (but,
ask a lawyer).

But even with parental permission, it's not allowed.  Besides, what about
students who are adults?

I understand - I was suggesting that perhaps the policy arose from
the law, and made universal so that no one would be asking parents
for permission (and thereby alerting them to the fact their kids
are surfing the iniquitous internet).

If there is such a law, rather than just a general guideline, Community
either ignores it or gets it taken care of by some sort of general
permission slip at the beginning of the year.  The only time the school
has called my parents for permission about anything other than field trips
was when a detective from the Sheriff Department interviewed some friends
and me to try to find out if we had found any evidence for a case he was
working on during a school project (we hadn't, but it made the project far
more interesting to find out about this case).

Does the Communicator have it's web page set up yet?  I t has been 8 months
since I have been able to read the paper.  I miss talking to Tom Dodd when
he came in to Kinko's to get the paper...

Ah well...  Could someone send me the URL for the paper?

The Communicator Web page is up.  It's ASCII only at this point, doesn't
have many issues on it, and is a bit out of date, but all of those will
change as soon as I have time to work on it.  I was planning to do it over
break, and ran into some technical difficulties that I didn't feel like
dealing with at the moment.

The URL is http://www.psc.lsa.umich.edu/~sgib/www/communicator

DISCLAIMER: The Communicator web page was created by me, and is in no way
endorsed by Community High or the Ann Arbor Public Schools.  It also
violates the Ann Arbor Public Schools WWW Policy, but since I didn't put
it on one of their computers there's not much they can do about it.

Thanks for the info.  I will check it out and see what it is all about.
It would be cool if you could put the whole paper layout on the web...

Is the paper available in postscript form?  People could then view it 
with thier local ghostview postscript viewer...

I'm still open to suggestions on how to do the graphical version.  I
haven't been seeing it as the highest priority, ASCII is the only one that
will be readable by people wiht slow modems or without PPP connections
(which, together, is a pretty large group of people).  Maybe we should end
up with a couple different graphical forms of it.

Interesting policy; thanks for posting it, Steve.  I actually really like
rules 1 and 3.  I think their purpose is two-fold: student safety and
general butt-covering.  (On the other hand, Steve's point that some
students are adults is a good one.)
 
I think there's a reasonable chance that posting pix & voice with full
names could attract electronic and real-world harassment.  A reporter
recently used the text description "15 year old cheerleader" on AOL to
guage the response, and it was like a sexual harassment magnet.  Imagine if
that were enhanced with a multimedia description!
 
Even if students were given responsibility for weighing that risk, if an
incident did occur, the AAPS would be in a sea of hot water.  The community
would start frothing and chanting "unplug the internet, skin the school
board!" and lawyers would dream up new cybernegligence lawsuits to sap the
schools.

To me, #4 seems pretty rediculous. In general, people want to discuss
offensive things, and putting examples on the net of things that seem to be
interesting or worth discussion seems a great way to get views from lots of
people. Uh, have these restrictions been revised? Were they followed?
Curious...
Take for example, a clip from Pulp Fiction. Obviously, this would be
prohibited under the policy above, but would definitely have its educational
value -- especially as CHS is regarded as the public art highschool around
here.

Has there been any change in these guidelines since 1994?
I have a hard time understanding why people can't be identified by name...only
initials, but "All student works shall be signed with the students full name".

   D'uuuuh!

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