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West Muskingum Local School District is a member of the Licking Area Computer Association (LACA) which is located in Newark, Ohio. LACA serves as the district's Internet Service Provider and hosts state reporting software and district data. All access to the Internet for the school district comes through LACA. LACA has put in place an Internet Filtering Protection appliance from iBoss. This system categorizes websites and is updated nightly. iBoss has employees who review websites and then categorize them according to their content.
The LACA Technical Advisory Groups (also known as LACATECH) votes on the categories to block or allow. There are three main groups of categories:
CIPA - Categories/websites that are blocked all the time, by all school districts, because of their obvious inappropriate or harmful content.
LACATECH - Categories/websites are voted on to maintain the integrity and security of all school district network operations. Categories are voted on and placed in this group if the majority of the LACATECH group believes it poses a threat to the integrity and security of the computer network.
None - This group open to our district computer network for students and staff to use.
West Muskingum has elected to accept both the CIPA and LACATECH groups for internet filtering, meaning that any websites that falls into the categories in these two groups will be blocked on our computer network.
West Muskingum can make exceptions to the filter by using a one of two processes. The former is for a staff member to submit the request to the Technology Department for re-categorization. The Technology Department will review the website to make sure it is educationally appropriate and meets board policy and the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2001 (CIPA). After the review is completed, the staff member is notified of the result of the review and pending the result, the website is allowed or blocked.