Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok. Websites similar to the ones listed are banned this school year. Some aren’t important to a student’s education, but could make a student’s academic career even harder. 

‘’I’m in three different art classes, and I use Pinterest and my camera and YouTube pretty avidly for all of those classes, so it prohibits my ability to be able to do certain things with my artwork and photograph my artwork for assignments,’’ senior Marz Marchant said. 

Art students are not the only ones that have been stunted by certain websites being blocked. Progress in other classes have been slowed down because of research information being limited. 

 “As a debater, doing research becomes really difficult. If I’m looking for something about encryption and I’m trying to look up something that bypasses it, that gets blocked just search wise, because you can’t look up how to bypass anything that is a blocked word. Right now our topic is about end-to-end encryption, and how law enforcement is getting around this. I have to choose my words carefully, because, for some reason, it’s blocked. Or last year I was starting my IB Math IA, and when I was doing that work for the internal assessment, I was just Googling ideas, and it was blocked,” senior Raina Cadena said. 

As IB assessments and projects draw near, not being able to undergo certain research aspects could hurt their overall grade. But in the opinion of some students, their education is not the part that is being stunted. 

‘’I wouldn’t say they’re exactly stunting educational growth, but they’re definitely preventing students from being able to exhibit their skills in the best possible way. It’s preventing creativity from flourishing. It’s preventing growth through the creative process,’’ junior Sarah Fernandez said. 

Websites are not the only instrument being blocked.Certain specific words in the search engine can be blocked as well. 

“The idea that there’s keywords that get blocked tends to be really harmful. We don’t want to look up how to bypass blocked games websites, but at the same time, it’s like you are impeding the research process,” Cadena said. 

Between stunted artists and annoyed academics, the students’ opinions of the recent banned websites are clear. This does not just affect students now. It could affect  students’ futures as well. 

“I would say that it just prohibits the need to express myself in the most creative and in the most fundamental ways, I feel like I would be able to collect ideas and create more plans for my art projects, if I were to create my portfolio and to build this line of art that I want to present to art colleges, I need to be able to have unique ideas and different perspectives,” Fernandez said. 

As Marchant said, “Give us back our Pinterest.”