Montesano School District

Excellence in Education

Montesano is a community where people learn,
grow and work together.  With high-quality
instruction, every student, regardless of race, class,
language, or disability, can succeed. 

Firewall

Dear Parents/Guardians/Students/Staff, 

As you know, we have introduced a great deal of technology over this past year. The district uses a number of tools to increase the safety and effectiveness when working with technology at school and at home.  When logged into a school device or logged into Chrome with a school account, the District has added an active filtering tool called Linewize from Family Connect.  This filtering tool is designed to block access to sites that are inappropriate for students to access.  No system is perfect, but this tool should increase our ability to provide a safer online environment for our students.   Linewize is replacing our current network firewall/filters that have been in place for a number of years.  

The functionalities described above are based upon the fact that the student is logged into the Chrome browser. The functionalities are built into the Chrome browser itself. Every time a student logs into a Chrome browser using their school account, they are sifted through the district filter. There is the possibility that their searches and screens can be monitored by the school. The same functionalities will be implemented when a student logs into the Chrome browser from any home or private computer. For example, if a student uses a home laptop to access their student.monteschools.org account by logging into the Chrome browser, that browser will be running through our school filters. That browser session and screen will also potentially be viewable/shareable with employees on the Montesano network. 

There are ways to maintain privacy and security on home computers. The easiest way to avoid compromising the security and privacy of a home computer is to have all school-related classwork and homework be done while logged into their school account.  All students should sign out of their school account for any non-school activity use. 

How to sign out of a Montesano Google Account in the Chrome web browser on a home PC or Mac device 

If you are using a Mac or PC, logging out of the Chrome web browser will help ensure that Montesano monitoring and web filtering software will cease to function on that computer: 

1. If you are signed into the web browser with a Montesano account, you will see the user icon for that account in the top right corner of the browser window. 

2. Click on the user icon and then select Sync is On

3. A new window will appear and select Turn Off

Click here for further instructions. 

Tim Trimble

Technology Director