EHS Needs to Rethink Websites to Block

Art+by+Sarah+Fidahussain

Art by Sarah Fidahussain

Sarah Fidahussain, Student Life Editor

EHS students have had their moment of shock when they are on their school-issued laptop and found they couldn’t access their own email.

While the school does have reasons behind blocking websites in an attempt to separate schoolwork and entertainment, it is fair to say that not all the websites they block are logical.

Websites like Zoom and Schoology either sometimes or never work. Websites like these are daily essentials for a student.

Zoom and Schoology may go down due to faulty WiFi according to the media secretary Stacey Schulte, but it does not distract from the fact that the laptops can be very unreliable when it comes to school use.

I have found that I would rather use my own personal laptop with its many faults than suffer the annoying blocking of websites.

I was doing research for a paper and when searching for sources, I kept running into the all too familiar pop-up saying this website was blocked. Simple things like that have made the school laptop more of an inconvenience than an advantage.

To my utter surprise, I am not the only student who feels this way.

According to a poll of 105 people on the EHS Yearbook Instagram, 93% of people said that they are annoyed with certain websites being blocked on the school computers.

For students who do not have another device or are in the limbo of sharing with their whole family, running into blocked websites is not an obstacle that can be avoided by simply swapping to a different device.

I am not saying that all websites should be unblocked. I do not think the school should unblock social media. Social media is a huge distraction and is definitely not necessary on a laptop. However, if you are simply doing homework and are running into blocked websites, there has to be some rethinking in what websites are deemed not school appropriate.