Lack of Supervision

Students who intentionally access unauthorized sites in violation of the school's acceptable use policy may be putting the school at risk despite the policy. Parents may litigate on the grounds that the student was not adequately supervised.

Students left alone to work on the school's computer system (e.g. the library or computer lab) for substantial periods of time may be considered inadequately supervised. Schools that have decided to forego content filters and rely on a student honor system coupled with strong teacher supervision must be particularly rigorous in this area. There have been numerous incidents of poorly supervised students getting unauthorized access to confidential files and/or accessing inappropriate material from the Internet.

Examples:

Students who inadvertently access unauthorized sites have not intentionally violated the acceptable use policy and these incidents are potential liabilities for the school. These incidents become more troublesome if the school has not provided any kind of protection for the students in the form of filtering of inappropriate sites. The problem is compounded the younger the age of the student.

• Example: It is not uncommon to type Whitehouse.com which brings one to a pornographic site instead of Whitehouse.gov which brings one to the official White House site.
  
  
• Example: An eleven year old doing a science report uses a search engine to find information on Ladybugs. The search engine returns scores of sites. The fourth site in the list is Ladybug XXX. Only close supervision by an adult prevented the student from innocently accessing the site.