Jonesboro Public Schools

Jonesboro Public Schools imposes multiple levels of content filtering for the school network and district owned devices, in order to keep students as safe as possible while on the internet.

​​​CHILDREN'S INTERNET PROTECTION ACT (CIPA)

The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires that K-12 schools and libraries use Internet filters and implement other measures to protect children from harmful online content as a condition for the receipt of certain federal funding, especially E-rate funds. 

While on the JPS network all devices are filtered through the district firewall and additionally through a Cisco content filter provided by the state of Arkansas Department of Information Systems. In addition, every access point in the district as a firewall policy enabled which prevents access to some services and websites that are deemed harmful to the student or to the network.

Devices that leave our network are not able to be filtered as stringently.  However, the Cisco filtering client is installed on all devices that go home with students and staff, and harmful categories are blocked in the off-network policy.

• Category filtering is not an exact science.  There are web sites with educational value that are in the vendor categories we have blocked. There are also occasional sites that are not appropriate which are not blocked because they are incorrectly categorized.  To provide or deny access to those websites, JPS Staff can submit requests and IT staff, along with building principals or district administrators will review websites.  These individual websites can typically be placed into an "allow" or "deny" to override the default categories of the filters.