This blocker has interfered with many student’s assignments causing complications for teachers and inconvenience for students. We would like to request that GUSD at least revises what sites they currently have blocked including YouTube, student portal, certain searches (such as the word snake), and many of google images. These blocks have dawdled student productivity in the classroom and outside of class. Some students have no other personal devices to use, limiting exposure to non-academics and limited personal freedoms which are important for children of this age range, 13 and up.

According to the article "Morales: Blocked Websites on Chromebooks Interfere With Learning" written by Arin Morales, Morales states that “The truth is, continuing to block unnecessary websites won’t do anything for the school. This accessibility issue does nothing except prompting kids to buy their own laptops to avoid the needless proxy that does more harm than good.” This article is evidence that unnecessary blockers do more harm to a student than good. In practice they don't improve anything related to a student's productivity or focus in class. Students may and have instead devoted class time to discovering work arounds for the blockers instead of finishing work.

In this second article called “Over-filtering in schools and libraries harms education, new ALA report finds” by Jazzy Wright, it talks about how the blocker can add more negative effects than positive effects on students. According to many sources such as Young, “‘Filtering hurts poor children the most,’ said Young. ‘These children are the most likely to depend on school and library provided internet access. Other children are likely to have unfiltered internet access at home or through their own mobile devices.’ There are 60 million Americans without access to either a home broadband connection or a smartphone.” This highlights the point that blocker could hurt students that come from a less wealthy background. Students with less economic stability now have limited access to the internet and updates about the world around them.

In conclusion, it would be beneficial to all parties to remove or nullify the Lightspeed Filter Agent blocker that is currently in effect for GUSD schools.

ALSO this blocker is recording us without our consent with I believe is illegal

Sources:

“Morales: Blocked Websites on Chromebooks Interfere With Learning" written by Arin Morales: https://nhschiefadvocate.org/2025/03/morales-blocked-websites-on-chromebooks-interfere-with-learning/ 

“Over-filtering in schools and libraries harms education, new ALA report finds” by Jazzy Wright: https://www.ala.org/news/2014/06/over-filtering-schools-and-libraries-harms-education-new-ala-report-finds