Is your school telling you that your child is safe from dangerous material with their Chromebooks?
EBSCO is a search engine database available in most Minnesota schools and accessible through the Minnesota ELibrary (ELM). Here is what we discovered.
Parents: Take action items at the end of this article!
According to NCOSE:
“EBSCO Information Services offers online library resources to public and private schools (K-12), colleges and universities, public libraries, and more. In its advertising for schools, it promises ‘fast access to curriculum-appropriate content.’ However, its Explora, Science Reference Center, Literary Reference Center, and other products, sometimes provide easy access to hardcore pornography sites and extremely graphic sexual content.”
“NCOSE recognizes improvements within the high school databases. However, NCOSE researchers have still found sexually graphic written content on high school databases, including sexually graphic written descriptions and instructions for oral sex and other sexual acts. While age-appropriate academic articles and research on issues of sexuality are important to include in high school educational databases, the nature of some articles are salacious and not academic. Is EBSCO intending to remove non-academic written depictions of sex acts from its high school databases?”
Child Protection League investigates MN eLibrary and Ebsco and look what we found!
Child Protection League walks you through several Minnesota school district website student research databases, using EBSCO and MN ELibrary.
What About School Filters?
“While most schools have filters on the school’s computers or WIFI (although often not good enough or installed correctly), such filters are not enough to solve this problem. School filters may stop the access of the hardcore pornography websites linked to from within the EBSCO database because they open up in a regular browser. This would only apply if the user were using the database while at school. We hear that students are often assigned homework using material in these databases and so are likely not always using filtered Internet. Additionally, even if not going directly to the porn website, the students are still seeing the URL within EBSCO and bombarded with the explicit language around those lists of porn websites.
“Other than blocking the content linked to outside of EBSCO, the school filters do not block within EBSCO on their own, as the whole system, EBSCO, has been given a green light to not be filtered. So, the hundreds of pornographic and explicit articles, books, magazines, and photographs housed within the EBSCO database are fully available to K-12 users. It appears to NCOSE, based on asking questions which quickly led administrators to stop speaking to us, that the schools have some ability to block out some content through the EBSCO system; however, they have to go in and do so one-by-one and essentially are doing very little of this.”
How Are They Getting Away With This?
“NCOSE didn’t even believe that this was true when we first heard about it! It seemed unbelievable that a company priding itself on providing content to children and creating strong user experiences with customizable services would be so irresponsible and that schools would allow it. Yet, for years, this has seemed to go unnoticed, becoming progressively worse.
“Also, most parents have no idea that this is happening!
- They aren’t used to using these kinds of databases themselves.
- They assume that these are age-appropriate just as EBSCO and the schools are suggesting.
- Many schools are actually telling parents not to use their child’s logins to the system. The parent logins don’t contain all of this material.”
What about the Schools?
“We hope that the schools themselves would be open to fixing this problem! The goal of this campaign is to help educate our school officials and empower them to also demand change.
“However, NCOSE has heard of teachers in Colorado bringing these issues to the attention of school administrators. These teachers’ concerns and suggestions to at least alert the parents have been routinely dismissed. One school district in Colorado, Cherry Creek School District, is defending much of the content brought to their attention, even though it is promoting behaviors such as public, group, and torture sex and includes direct live links to hardcore pornography websites. The school administrators are also arguing that they are not responsible since it is coming from a third party provider, EBSCO, even though the schools are the ones promoting these resources to their students.”
Take Action
- Investigate your school, using the CPL webinar to guide you.
- If porn is accessible through your school’s database, bring it immediately to the attention of the administration and demand that they take action to stop it.
- Please also notify Child Protection League at Contact Us or by email at contact@cplaction.com so we can track these investigations. If you need assistance, we will provide help.
- Regardless of your individual school, contact school board members and legislators. We expect them to address this, but they need to hear from the public.The state of Minnesota should prohibit libraries from contracting with companies that do not filter porn. EBSCO is not the only database that is available to our children that is guilty of not filtering. No contracts should ever be allowed in Minnesota with any such company.