GUSD staff attend safety conference
MORGAN HILL
Forty educators and law enforcement officials gathered to address an issue that is increasingly intruding on student life – the danger of the Internet.
Now that children are spending more time hidden behind closed doors and computer screens and less time at local parks and malls, educators have taken it upon themselves to explore the threats of the World Wide Web.
Of the 260 million Internet users in North America alone, more than 80 million are children. The average U.S. family spends one hour per day using instant messaging programs and 54 percent of all children use the Internet regularly.
The prevalence of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook has exploded and children have developed a new medium of socializing. With this came new ways of bullying and harassment, said Steve Wolf of the Irvine Police Department.
Frank Valadez, district attendance officer for Gilroy Unified School District, organized the Dec. 7, five-hour conference and invited Wolf to speak about his 15 years of experience specializing in juvenile law enforcement as a school resource officer in Southern California.
With the help of principals, Valadez and Wolf hope that conference attendees will take what they learned at the conference and help disseminate the information to parents. Silvia Reyes, the principal of Las Animas Elementary who also attended the conference, is working with Valadez to access funds to provide a free workshop for parents on the topic.
Although Wolf covered a variety of topics ranging from identity theft and online safety to blogging and social networking sites, he said the biggest danger is “people feeling too comfortable, thinking the person on the other side of the instant messaging window is a friend.” The anonymity of the Internet lends itself to safety concerns, he said.
Wolf pointed out how the whole concept of “friends” has changed with the surge of MySpace and Facebook. MySpace accounts hit the 100 million mark over a year ago and is still climbing. Facebook claims more than 58 million active users and adds 250,000 new registrations per day.
“Kids are 13 to 17 years old and have 800 MySpace ‘friends.’ In reality, they’ve only met 10 of those people,” Wolf said. “You go to your ‘friend’s’ page, see a few pictures, hear some music playing. You have no idea if that person is 14 or 40. People are hiding behind their profiles. It worries me how kids instantly see strangers as ‘friends.’ ”
Wolf said he “absolutely” sees more Internet-related crimes. At the conference, he shared several examples of teenagers being harassed or stalked by adults who were their so-called MySpace friends.
