If you’ve ever used a Truckee High School Chromebook for more than a few hours you would have experienced the annoying firewall called Securly installed on every device. This program is supposed to limit students from seeing adult content and from playing games in class. However, recently it has gotten too aggressive and is putting low-income students at a disadvantage.

Currently one of the highest-paying majors in college is Computer Science. According to CNBC, in 2023 it had the second-highest average pay, with an average salary of $108,500 right out of college. Truckee High School prides itself on allowing students of all income levels to have proper preparation for college and careers after high school however, TTUSD’s implementation of Securly has limited students from doing this.

Chromebooks cannot run programs natively due to them basically being a browser disguised as a laptop. However certain companies have created web-based coding programs that can get around this issue. Some examples of this are repl.co and glitch.me. Both of these websites have been blocked by Securly at the risk of these coding projects containing games, even though from my experience over 3 years on repl, a majority are just educational projects. Some of the more nerdy readers might be thinking that you can still run javascript projects by using the file system however, even this is blocked as Securly blocks javascript files from running locally. Another odd site to be blocked is cloudconvert.com which is simply a site for converting image types to another. There are no games or anything adult on this site and this creates an inconvenience for me at least once or twice a week.

This creates a massive disadvantage for low-income students as those who cannot afford a personal computer will be blocked from accessing a trove of information and opportunities for computer science and beyond. Additionally, these blocks impact students at home as well, which creates a challenging online environment for pursuing personal projects.

Apps such as securly are a very bad practice for schools. Not only does it limit tons of information, but it also is a massive breach of privacy as it is possible teachers can look at a student’s screen. After asking Truckee High’s principal, Mr. Neuberger, said that certain classes do use this feature but it is not enabled for every teacher/class.

If one wanted to take an extreme approach to this view one could even say that Securly limits freedom of speech, privacy, and education opportunities for low-income students as many forums like Quora and Reddit, which contain a good amount of non-adult/game-related content, are completely out of bounds for those who cannot afford a second computer. 

Keeping students safe online is important, but schools must make sure that they are not being overkill and limiting information. Truckee High has failed at achieving this goal, however there is hope. I strongly urge Truckee High’s tech department to look into how they are affecting students’ access to information and do more research into a more appropriate way of keeping students safe.