The only method schools have to reasonably provide the required filtering to be CIPA compliant is to partner with an outside vendor. Some of larger known vendors in the education market are iBoss, Barracuda, Lightspeed and OpenDNS. Partnering with these companies allows us to filter the 3 required categories of :
a) pornography
b) obscene material and
c) content harmful to minors
Browning Public Schools current content partner is Barracuda.
All of these companies use peer reviews, user reporting and their own proprietary methods to scan and classify content on the Internet's many millions of web sites. Sometimes the reason is as simple as the web site went down and gets detected as being parked, other times someone takes the site over and starts redirecting traffic to one of the 3 categories we are required to filter for.
Many of these issues are cleared up in just a few minutes to several days depending on the situation. In the event you feel a site should be considered for review, send a helpdesk ticket with the category that is being reported for the site being filtered. Use the below screenshot for review of the category we ask you to report to speed up the review process. We can review and determine if the filtered reason is correct or allow the site through, and if needed, submit to Barracuda to have the site classified correctly for other school districts.
Ultimately the best method is a combination of the web filter and classroom monitoring to direct students attention to appropriate and educationally relevant resources for their learning day.