Recently Henrico has been banning most websites on the internet, to the point where things that we had for years were banned either over the summer or some time in the past two months. It's gotten out of hand to the point where reasearch is difficult, and any kind of recreational activity during school is severly limited if using the computer. this combined with the new cell phone policy means that there really isn't much for students to do recreationally during free time in school. Besides recreational activity, it severely affects the ability to do reasearch with even trusted websites having been banned recently. Most searches not using clever are blocked, and this can hinder reasearch methods. Bans are extreme enough that things such as listening to music for focus becomes difficult becuase most every music site other than youtube is blocked, and youtube has heavy blocking over most of its content.  It's at the point where a lot of the sites that the teachers try to have us use are blocked. This has become a continuous problem among HCPS schools, and it's important that this is adressed for the learning ability (and somewhat sanity) of the students who have to deal with this.

     If things don't change it could hinder the long-term learning of students, as well as make an already stressful job for teachers have even more steps to it. It leaves students with nothing to do when they're caught up, if they haven't brought a book or have anyone to talk to. An article shows how boredom negatively affects students, saying, "Highly bored learners typically avoid schoolwork, reduce their efforts in their work, are not well self-regulated, and show reduced motivation (Schwartze et al., 2020)." (Bekker, Christiaan I, et al. “The Happy Learner: Effects of Academic Boredom, Burnout, and Engagement.” Frontiers in Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 10 Jan. 2023). We see that bored students negatively affects things such as focus and motivation. This could be a problem in the future with increasingly more bored students who haven't anything to do for long periods of time. Regulation of this may help with keeping student focus as well as helping with productivity.

     This needs to be adressed now because of how it has already affected students and how it will in the future. Currently we see students struggling with either boredom or trying constantly to find an unblocker that in some cases could be dangerous to the security of the computer and even the school system. This isn't a long-term solution by blocking most sites, as it opens doors for desperate students to find work-arounds that aren't always safe. We could possibly prevent a major breach in the school system by dealing with this now instead of waiting for a student to make a bad decision and pick an unblocker that opens the doors for a virus. I call upon HCPS schools to review the automaticall blocking of most sites and see if there's a way to either revise the system or make it less strict about the sheer number of sites blocked.