Parents and staff of Soleado Elementary School in Rancho Palos Verdes met with team members of the High Tech Services Reserve Unit’s Internet Safety Team for two hours on March 25th. This makes the third Internet Safety presentation performed outside of Orange County to date.
The word is getting out there and the schools are starting to respond to our program. The best advertising is “word of mouth.” A number of topics were covered during the evening’s presentation, including the latest phenomena linked with “Social Networking”. Parents were shown a number of techniques that can be used to secure their home networks and track their children’s activities while on-line. Additional topics addressed were Cyber Bullying, Identity Theft, and Child Predators. Age appropriate parent/student contracts were made available for the parents to go over with their children to make sure they understand what is deemed “acceptable behavior” on their home computers. We are often asked for a “Silver Bullet” program they can install on their computers that will fix all their problems and track their child’s activities. There is no such program; it doesn’t exist. Good parenting and being “Net Smart” is the best line of defense in the cyber world.
Liability issues were discussed regarding children downloading and distributing copyrighted material such as movies and music CD’s. Parents can be held liable for their children’s indiscretions in these areas. Simple suggestions were made to parents to such as photocopy the contents of their wallet or billfold and store it in a safe place. This way if the wallet is lost or stolen, they will have a starting point and be able to contact the credit card companies with their card numbers immediately. We covered a lot of information in two hours and believe we have an important message to share.
Many of these tips can be found on the Internet Safety brochure on the OCSD web site, along with contact information to make arrangements for presentations to your group by Reserve Sergeant Jim Ellis and his team. If you would like to have the team present to your group, please contact Reserve Sergeant Ellis by e-mail at jaellis@ocsd.org or by phone at (310) 335-4269.
Submitted by, Reserve Sergeant, James A. Ellis, HTSRU, Community Services.