There are elements of Granite Bay High School that operate much like a business. And like most businesses, when employees – students – are using the company’s equipment, they sign their privacy away.

Students at GBHS sign the Computer Technology Agreement at the beginning of the year, which gives them permission to use school computers. But often, students fail to read the fine print.

For example, one part of the technology agreement states: “Electronic communications (e-mail, chat, and instant messaging), files and other Internet records may be examined for educational and administrative purposes and to verify that acceptable-use guidelines are being followed.”

In other words, officials in the Roseville Joint Union High School District have both the capability and the legal right to read student e-mails composed on district computers.

These guidelines shouldn’t come as a shock. They are printed in GBHS student planners and in the contract signed at the beginning of the year. Despite this fact, many GBHS students remain ignorant of the district’s policies.

“I had no idea they could check my e-mail,” GBHS senior Patrick Gill said. “That seems rather un-Constitutional to me.”

However, GBiT tech group manager and GBHS senior Matt Ford said this information should be common knowledge to GBHS students.

“It has always been true that district officials can see which Web sites you are going to,” Ford said. “As long as your e-mail is going over the standard traffic channels, then (it is accessible to district officials).”

GBiT supervisor and computer technology teacher Mike Fischer agreed with Ford, adding that students are often unaware of many of the district’s rights regarding technology.

“I’m sure some students are surprised to learn (that the district has access to student e-mails on school computers),” Fischer said.

“It’s true in companies you work at as well, anything you do on a computer for a company, they have access to. They own the e-mail; that’s the property of the company. Anything that travels across a district network they can see, but they aren’t interested in it.”

Despite the capability of district officials to examine student electronic correspondence, it is not something that’s done on a regular basis.

“We have the responsibility to monitor our network (and) obviously anytime students are at our school (they are) within our network,” said Brent Mattix, the GBHS assistant principal in charge of technology.

The district is unlikely to exercise this power, Mattix said, except in extreme circumstances.

“If we have threats or negative information about our school coming from a teacher or a student, we’d have those records and we’d have to go back and evaluate that,” Mattix said.

Another topic that students often are not informed about is the reasoning behind the blocking of sites such as YouTube, Myspace and chat programs. Despite common misconceptions, Fischer said it has nothing to do with “Big Brother.”

“(One) problem with the YouTube issue is that when a lot of people are using it, the whole internet gets bogged down with traffic,” Fischer said. “It isn’t so much of a content issue as it is a bandwidth issue.”

Fischer compared the bandwidth limitation to the school parking lot. Too many users at one time, using so much power, would slow down net speed for every user in the district.

Because of this, Web sites deemed unnecessary to school productivity, like YouTube, are blocked unless needed by a teacher.

“On the average busy school day last year, our district…was experiencing performance problems because our Internet connection was tapped out,” said district director of technology Mike Fury. “Furthermore, approximately 60 percent of it was from Google Video. We then estimated it would cost the District approximately $50,000 per year to purchase the additional Internet bandwidth needed to accommodate our immediate and short term usage.”

Needless to say, the district decided to pass on the expensive upgrades. Instead, officials made the decision to limit student access to Web sites that are not directly conducive to learning.

Now the district uses a filtering program to weed out troublesome Web sites from the school’s Internet use.

According to Fury, there are almost 30 different categories for inappropriate Web sites, ranging from banking and e-commerce to social networking and gaming.

However, many of these Web sites aren’t blocked at the leisure of the district but by federal law, the Child Internet Protection Act or CIPA.

According to the law, every school and library in the country is required to “block or filter Internet access to pictures that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors, enforce a policy to monitor online activities of minors.”

However, while every school in the country is required to follow CIPA guidelines, different districts interpret the rules in various ways.

Use of these Web sites, both appropriate and inappropriate is monitored and recorded by the District Technology Team.

Greg Ramseth, head of technology for the Placer Union High School District, discussed how schools in his district run their computer blocking systems.

Ramseth explained that unlike the RJUHSD, the Placer district cannot read student e-mails, doesn’t block YouTube and leaves a lot of responsibility in the hands of the students and teachers.

“Our responsibility as both staff and students is to use it to further education, and most users deep down know what’s constructively educational and what’s not. We give choices and generally count on an individual’s good conscience,” Ramseth said. “Who would have the heart to block the good journalistic satire on The Onion?”

While Ramseth is only joking, the RJUHSD’s blocking policies rarely present issues for students.

“The reason the district (doesn’t give GBiT unlimited power) is somebody could rewire all of the traffic to one computer for more speed,” Ramseth said. “Someone could get on the teacher-network to change their grades; it’s probably for the best.”

Despite restrictions like not being able to work with teacher-computers, unblock Web sites without permission and not having access to wiring cabinets, Ford still believes that blocking certain Web sites is an essential role of the district.

“They should definitely be blocking Myspace, not only because it’s frivolous but also because it is dangerous; it is a liability issue for them,” Ford said. “They should probably be blocking some of the games, but blocking YouTube and (other sites) with educational value (is pointless), that’s just blocking information and not protecting us in any shape or form.”

Part of the difficulty in blocking sites like YouTube is the blocking system itself. There is no way to only block certain types of videos on YouTube. The district must either block the entire site or leave it completely open for everyone to watch, leaving little wiggle room.

“I wish more students would take technology classes and become software programmers,” Fischer said. “If you could come up with a better Internet blocking software tool so that we could only block parts of a Web site rather than all of it, you could make a lot of money there. America needs Internet programmers and there are high paying jobs for people who are good at it.”

The district technology department is currently working to improve blocking systems and perhaps GBHS students can look forward to a day where they can work on their assignments while simultaneously gaining inspiration from the Daily Show.

“There’s a tremendous amount of education to be found on the Internet,” Mattix said, “but it’s a double edged sword. There’s a lot of negative stuff out on the Internet, there is a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of inappropriate stuff, and, if it’s left unchecked to the developing mind, that could be a bad thing.”