Conejo Schools Foundation gets Internet safety grant

The Conejo Schools Foundation has received a $25,000 grant from Verizon to further technology education in the school district.

The Verizon Foundation Internet Safety Program Grant will help to create a program that will increase student awareness of how to safely use the Internet. The program is tailored to each grade level from kindergarten through high school and provides teachers with new information to work into their existing computer classes and labs.

"The intent is to develop Internet safety curriculum that is ageappropriate for each grade level and that teachers can kind of just drop into existing lesson plans," said Cindy Goldberg, executive director of the Conejo Schools Foundation. "Parents don't really know what their kids are doing online, and statistics show that kids don't tell them what they are doing. This will serve to open the dialogue."

Some pieces of the program include teaching younger children about what kinds of personal information is not okay to share on the Internet.

The program will also include filming presentations by Thousand Oaks Police Department Capt. Randy Pentis on Internet safety and making them available to older students as well as their parents.

Visual segments will be shown in classrooms, in school libraries, on Verizon's channel 32, on cable channel 20 and at the website www.conejoschools.org.

The program also offers proxy server filters to household computers in the Conejo Valley school district's area so that parents can set certain levels of protection for their children.

The Conejo Schools Foundation is a nonprofit organization committed to raising money to provide grants for CVUSD.

Goldberg said the Conejo Schools Foundation hopes to continue its partnership with the Verizon Foundation and plans to build on the program in coming years.