Teen suspended for Web site

A Lewis and Clark High School sophomore brought Internet freedom to his peers for two months with a Web site he called Bad Dog.

Then the school put his dog in the pound, and his computer programming teacher was disciplined.

Conrad Sykes, 16, created a Web site that bypassed the district’s Internet content filter, which was hampering student research, the student said. Sykes said he did this so students could access research sites – but it also allowed students to visit adult sites or others that the school district intends to screen out.

Sykes’ site was so successful that many Spokane Public School students – and people from as far away as Alabama and Pennsylvania – used it thousands of times between Dec. 14 and Feb. 22.

Sykes was even asked by his computer teacher, Wes Marburger, to make a presentation to other classes on the number of visitors to his Web site. The district filter is called Bess, and a dog is in the logo.

In the end, Sykes was suspended for two days in February for violating school computer use policies. His teacher was given a written reprimand and removed from teaching computer classes. The state Office of Professional Practices is now investigating and could potentially take away Marburger’s teaching certificate.

Marburger could not be reached for comment. Sykes’ father did not want his son to be interviewed for this story.

According to investigation notes, Marburger knew about the Bad Dog site and what it could do and allowed Sykes to present to two classes. Sykes essentially explained what his site did, how he sold ad space on it and made money every time someone visited his site.

“You stated your reasoning was that Bess blocked some appropriate sites and that the assignment was to help students learn how to look at Internet site statistics,” said Staci Vesneske, executive director of human resources in a March 17 letter to Marburger. “Your conduct allowed Spokane Public School student to bypass the district’s filtering system over 3,000 times, potentially exposing them to inappropriate content and putting their safety at risk.”

Investigators took photos of school computers that were sprinkled with tiny slips of paper with the address of the proxy Web site. Investigators found Marburger was lax in removing those bits of paper regularly.

Marburger told investigators that he should have reported the site to school Principal Jon Swett.

“I want the best for my kids. I want them to be aware of professional issues,” Marburger said in an interview with a district investigator.

In a blog, an online journal kept by Sykes as part of his computer class, Sykes explained why he created the proxy site.

“I hate any and all censorware. Lewis and Clark High School has a censorware system,” Sykes wrote and posted on Dec. 18. “I just hope that what I’m doing now will help prevent our country from becoming like China (China has a country wide filtering system) and I hope I inspired future other teens to do the same.”

A proxy, as it’s called, creates an opening through the filter that allows a student to surf any Web site without restriction. The proxy site essentially fools the filter into thinking that the student is still looking at an allowable site.

Once students opened up the Bad Dog Web site, they could go anywhere and leave no obvious record of pages they visited, said Ken Brown, district executive director of technology and information systems for Spokane Public Schools.

“We looked at the computers in the classrooms; they didn’t have anything cached that would indicate that they would go to hard-core porn sites,” Brown said. “A lot of the time kids are going around (Bess) to get to games, game sites, and also to maybe find information about how they can get software.”

Students from several district schools used the Bad Dog site, according to investigator notes, including Ferris High School, Rogers High School, Skills Center, Bryant, Sacajawea Middle School and Shaw Middle School. The entire district accessed Bad Dog 3,052 times in about two months.

Brown said the Web site used a domain name from the Turks and Caicos Islands nation, which probably sold its domain to Internet companies. District investigators read in great detail on Sykes’ blog how he built the site. They’re also watching for similar proxy sites.

“Our primary goal is to protect the students as best we can and protect the computer environment of the district,” Brown said.

David Burt, a spokesman for Secure Computing, the company that supplies Bess to about 16 million high school students nationally, said there have been issues in the past of students learning to get past the software. Technologically advanced teens set up proxies but they never last long, Burt said.

“These proxies are victims of their own success,” Burt said. “They start telling everyone, then we find it, then we block the proxies. We have seen this at other schools. It’s really not that big of a deal. It’s not that common, but it does happen.”

Sykes wrote about his experience of being called into the office on Feb 22.

“The call came when I was in my first period class. I was told that I was supposed to bring my things with me to the office because I was going to be leaving,” Sykes wrote.

He was interviewed by three adults who he said were extremely kind as they posed their questions. He explained that the site was needed “so people could actually do research without having every page being blocked.”

He was then told of his suspension.

“This hit me like a train considering that I have never been disciplined by the school before, and I mean never. I never got a pink slip when I was in grade school and never received a citation in middle school so this was a totally new experience for me. The worst part wasn’t even the suspension, it was being told that I had to shut down Bad Dog immediately and permanently if I ever planned on coming back to school (they said it in a kinder way, but I understood what they meant),” he wrote.

That night he deleted the program at home.

“The Bad Dog project was one of the greatest learning experiences of my Internet life, and I also had a lot of fun doing it too,” Sykes said. “Overall, I can’t complain about how things turned out.”