Students are forced to fill out a consent form in order to watch youtube. Students have been blocked from youtube otherwise. Photo courtesy of ABC Action News.

Montgomery County Public Schools is now enforcing a policy where students must get a permission slip filled out and signed by a parent in order to gain access to Youtube services. For the most part, the response by the student body is negative, as it seems like MCPS is babying its young adults.

The new requirement of a permission slip is silly and doesn’t have any positive impact. If students want to watch something on Youtube and it’s blocked because they don’t have a form, they can simply pull up the exact same video on their phones. The blocking of Youtube actually causes more harm than good, as students who forget to get the form might have their education hindered by tedious hoops to jump through in order to watch a video for class or do research for an assignment.

MCPS needs to understand that they can’t hide the contents of the internet from teens because anything on the internet is so easy to both find and use. This act is just an extra hoop to jump through in a school system that already has so much red tape. Besides, MCPS has already blocked out videos and sites that are deemed unacceptable for a school computer. So if the content on Youtube that is unacceptable or inappropriate is blocked, why is there a need for an extra step to view content that has already been filtered to be made appropriate for a learning environment?

A slippery slope could follow.  Next, it could be a form being required to use Google or any other popular site. Overall, the new requirement is pointless,had no need to be enacted and further actions of similar requirements should not be made.