Safe Schools Program PC Pandora's Safe Schools program pledges to donate $100,000 worth of free software to every school district in the country. Schools need only ask for it. According to a 2005 study of approximately 1,500 Internet-using adolescents, over 33% of the youths studied had been victimized through electronic bullying; at the same time, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that approximately one in seven youths who are active online (10 to 17-years-old) receive a sexual solicitation or approach over the Internet.

    Despite mandatory Internet safety courses and curriculum, the problems of outside sexual predators, cyberbullying between peers, and illegal file sharing still runs rampant. With computers in nearly every school in the country, and almost every classroom, students constantly find the opportunity to utilize and surf the Internet.The software will help schools keep their students safe from online predators and cyberbullying, and keep their school machines safe from illegal file sharing.

    School administrators are in need of an efficient and cost-effective solution to help keep their students safe online and free from harm. You can't get much better than free. Committed to keeping kids and families safe online, Pandora Corp. is offering to donate up to $100,000 worth of its parental control/monitoring software, PC Pandora, to school districts and individual schools across the country through the new PC Pandora's Safe Schools program.

    The software is a desktop application designed to allow parents and teachers the ability to monitor and control PC activity by children. In addition to basic filtering and blocking functions (that help to control access to material like pornography and music or video files), the program will keep an accurate record of all actions on the PC via screen capture. This enables school administrators to make sure no one is trying to solicit their students online or partaking in cyberbullying.

    "PC Pandora fulfills a very important need for parents and teachers," states Co-founder of Pandora Corp. Manny Coats. "Kids at school fall victim to Internet bullying and sexual predator solicitations on a daily basis. It's up to all of us to help keep our kids and our communities safe and this software is a great tool to utilize."

    The catch? There isn't one. The company explains that school officials simply have to request the software and provide an IT liaison to coordinate the giveaway and installations within schools. A member of the PC Pandora team will provide download instructions, activation keys and a brief tutorial. Schools are mere steps away from having their PCs better safeguarded from online predators and cyberbullying.

    Coats adds, "By offering software to schools, we hope to widen the impact and availability of PC Pandora, while at the same time giving educators a great way to help keep students safe online during -and even after- school hours." To make the offer even sweeter, Pandora Corp. will provide participating schools and districts with a unique code that will allow parents to purchase the software at a discounted price. The code will then be tracked and a portion of those sales (25%) will be donated to the school/district. Coats hopes that schools will then invest that money in online safety education for parents and students.

    Students Online At School: According to a 2004 survey conducted by St. Bernard Software of 200 technology decision-makers from small, medium and large school districts in suburban, rural and urban settings in 41 states…
- 48% Estimate their students spend more than two hours per week on the Internet during school hours
- 59% Report incidents of students accessing inappropriate Web content in the past year
- 39% Cite examples of students accessing pornography
- 25% Cite examples of students accessing violent content