I'm a high school cybersecurity student who builds small websites as part of learning. For a while, sharing those projects with classmates and teachers was straightforward. Then LCPS blocked Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, and GitHub Pages — and suddenly it wasn't.

I get that the district has to draw lines somewhere. But blocking GitHub Pages is hard to defend. GitHub is where professional developers work. It's where open-source software lives. Banning it doesn't protect students from the internet; it just means we're learning on tools that don't reflect how the industry actually operates.

For CS students specifically, this matters more than it might seem. Deploying a project — actually putting it somewhere people can visit — is how classroom theory turns into something real. A static site on GitHub Pages teaches you version control, deployment workflow, and basic hosting concepts simultaneously. You can't replicate that with a screenshot.

The fix doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. LCPS could restore access to GitHub Pages for high school CS students with a usage agreement in place. Teachers could monitor how it's used. That's a reasonable middle ground, and it already exists at plenty of other districts.

Right now, students interested in tech careers are being handed an education with pieces missing. That's worth fixing.