Park Forest / Chicago Heights School District 163 is making every effort to ensure "safe surfing" for the children in our schools. We are compliant with the governments Child Internet Safety Act. If you have any concerns regarding this please let us know at: comment@sd163.com.

We filter in the following categories:

Adult Only
Sites that the author or publisher labels as being strictly for adults. Such labels include "Adults Only", "You must be 18 to visit this site", "Registration is allowed only for people 18 or older", and "You must be of a legal drinking age to visit this site".

Alcohol
Sites that advocate or promote the recreational use of alcoholic beverages. This category includes, but is not limited to, sites that contain information about drink mixes, home-brew recipes, and drinking games.

Auction
Sites that offer access to online auctions. Online auctions rarely monitored, can contain rapidly changing content that may expose users to material that would otherwise be filtered under categories such as Pornography, Weapons, Lingerie, or Violence.

Chat
Sites that offer access to online chat rooms, or allow users to download chat software that enables the online posting and receiving of real-time messages.

Drugs
Sites that promote or advocate recreational drug use. This category is not limited to controlled substances. Sites that promote or advocate recreational use of prescription drugs are also included. The Drugs category includes sites that contain information about topics such as growing, buying, or selling marijuana, glass pipes, or bongs, mixing of legal substance with alcohol, running methamphetamine labs, or inhaling various forms of fumes.

Electronic Commerce
Sites that allow users to make online purchases. Many e-commerce sites pose a risk to users by offering direct access to items that would normally be filtered under other categories such as Weapons, Profanity, Lingerie, or Pornography.

Employment Search
Sites that provide direct access to employment resources, such as job listings.

Free Mail
Sites that offer Web-based e-mail accounts. Free Mail sites can expose users to harmful content delivered via e-mail file attachments.

Free Pages
Sites that offer free Web site space. Although many of these free Web site providers post rules and regulations for content, they do not always adequately monitor this content. Users often abuse free Web site services by posting offensive content under multiple pseudonyms.

Gambling
Sites where you place a bet with the expectation of winning a prize. Gambling sites require online payment in order to participate.

Games
Sites that offer online games and related information such as cheats, codes, demos, and emulators. The Games category also includes contests or role-playing games that can be played online.

Hate/Discrimination
Sites that specifically target a group of people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity in a hateful, derogatory manner. The language of these sites often includes racial slurs and is insulting, abusive, and sometimes violent.

Illegal
Sites that promote illegal activities, or offer instructions or advice that can be used to commit illegal activities. Such activities include making or distributing child pornography, making bombs, hacking (breaching computer security), phreaking (breaching phone security or phone service theft), lock picking, selling pirated material (such as music, videos, software, or fake IDs), and counterfeiting.

Jokes
Sites that post jokes, humorous stories, or other forms of humor.

Lingerie
Sites that provide photos of models wearing lingerie, underwear, or otherwise scant attire.

Message/bulletin boards
Sites that permit messages to be posted and read immediately or daily message posts.

Murder/suicide
Sites that offer information about committing murder or suicide, or that contain photos of crime scenes or autopsies. Sites containing galleries of "death pics" are included in this category.

News
Sites that contain material reported in a newspaper, periodical, or a newscast, whether it is current or archived.

Nudity
Sites that contain photos or images of bare or visible genitalia, pubic hair, buttocks, or female breasts. This category includes only sites that contain non-pornographic nudity (that is, nudity that is not intended to be sexually arousing or erotic).

P2P/loopholes
Sites that offer a loophole that can be exploited to access pages which would otherwise be filtered out from your service. This includes proxy evasion directions, Peer to Peer software, anonymizing services, and some Web translators. etc. Unless this category is selected, the system's Internet Content Filtering protection can be compromised.

Personal information
Sites that gather personal information (such as name, address, credit card number, school, or personal schedules) that may be used for malicious intent.

Personals
Sites that contain personal advertisements, including information about mail-order brides, dating services, escort services, or pen pals.

Pornography
Sites that contain material that are intended to be sexually arousing or erotic. This includes photos, animation, cartoons, and stories. This also includes child pornography.

Profanity
Sites that contain crude, vulgar, or obscene language or gestures. Words used in a context that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as "considered vulgar" or "considered obscene". Sites that include excessive use of letter substitution, such as "f@ck, sh*t, @ss, P*Ss" are still considered to fit into the Profanity category.

Recreation/entertainment
Sites that contain information about various recreation and entertainment pursuits such as motion pictures, television shows (excluding News and Sports), theatre productions and music.

School cheating information
Sites that promote plagiarism or cheating by providing term papers, written essays, or exam answers.

Search engines
Sites that offer unfiltered, unrestricted, unverified, search engines.

Search terms
This category restricts access to search result pages based on key words that are known to return offensive results, but does not block access to search engines.

Sex
Sites that contain descriptions or depictions of sexual acts, specifically those without the intent to arouse (sites which contain material intended to arouse fall under the Pornography category). Sexual merchandise and fetish sites fall under the Sex category.

Sports
Sites that include updated information about professional and collegiate sports, such as game scores, player status, trades, and commentary.

Stocks
Sites that include information about stock trading, stock quotes, or the stock market.

Swimsuits
Sites that contain photos of models in swimwear, especially fashion swimwear photos.

Tasteless/gross
Sites that include content such as tasteless humor, excretory functions (vomiting, urinating, or defecating), graphic medical or accident scene photos (containing blood or wounds), and some extreme forms of body modification (cutting, branding, or genital piercing).

Tobacco
Sites that advocate or promote the recreational use of tobacco.

Violence
Sites that contain graphic images or written descriptions of reckless violence or grave injury (for example, mutilation, maiming, or dismemberment). The Violence category includes graphically violent games.

Visual search engine
Sites that provide photo and video specific Internet search capabilities.

Weapons
Sites that contain information about buying, making, modifying, or using weapons such as guns, knives, swords, or ammunitions.

Web page hosting / free pages
Sites that provide Web page hosting for their users such as homepages that share a common domain. These sites include those provided by ISPs, University/education servers, free Web page hosts, etc. Although many of these Web page providers post rules and regulations for content, they do not always adequately monitor this content. Users often abuse Web page services by posting offensive content under multiple pseudonyms. Because this category contains hundreds of millions of pages, it is not practical to assign more granular categorization to individual pages. However, any page can be added to your local block and allow list, enabling access to specific content even if the category has been selected to be blocked.

Exceptions

Education
The "Education" exception allows access to sites that contain material that may belong to another category, such as Sex, Nudity, or Violence, but that relates to an educational topic such as classic literature, history, art, or sex education.

For kids
The "For Kids" exception allows sites designed specifically for kids that contain material that may be filtered under another category, such as Games or Jokes.

History
The "History" exception allows access to sites that contain material that may be in another category, such as Sex or Violence, but that is non-fictional and historically significant.

Medical
The "Medical" exception allows access to sites that contain material that may belong to another category, such as Nudity or Tasteless/Gross, but that relates to the study or practice of medicine.

Moderated
The "Moderated" exception allows access to moderated message/bulletin boards or chat sites. The author or publisher of these sites must state that efforts are made to prevent offensive material from being posted.

Text/spoken only
The "Text/Spoken Only" exception allows sites that contain material that may belong to another category, such as Pornography, but that is strictly in text or spoken word format. For example, the Text/Spoken Only category distinguishes written erotica from graphic pornography sites.