Sudbury Public Schools · Family Resource
What SPS students have actually run into on school devices
These are documented cases from our own schools and outside research on what kids encounter on school-issued devices. Each entry links to its source where one exists. If something like this has happened to your child, we want to hear about it.
A "life simulator" game with sexual choice prompts
An SPS sixth grader was playing BitLife during the school day, a life-simulation game, on her school-issued Chromebook. Partway through, the game asked her character whether to have a threesome and whether to use a condom — presented as ordinary gameplay choices to an 11-year-old.
Violent, sexual movie ads during a study assignment
A seventh grader was asked by his teacher to build Quizlet flashcards, on his SPS email account, to study for a test. Every few questions, an ad break played footage from an R-rated film with violent and sexually explicit content — on a school-assigned task, using a school account.
One mistyped letter, one unblocked porn site
In an engineering class, a sixth grader was told to go to Tinkercad. She mistyped the web address by a single letter and landed on an explicit pornography site — one the school's device and web filtering never caught. The mistyped page was visible to her and to nearby classmates before it could be closed.
Months of normalized AI use for schoolwork, then a scramble
SPS students had open access to generative AI tools for academic work through the end of 2025, before the district disabled them. When access was cut off, students reported widespread frustration — a strong sign the tools had been used heavily, and treated as routine, for months before anyone flagged it as a problem. Recent research on tens of thousands of secondary students found that regular AI users' exam scores fell sharply over time even as their homework scores rose, evidence the tools masked real learning loss rather than preventing it.
Live sports streamed during class time
Students were reported watching live March Madness basketball games on school-issued devices during instructional time — open, unrelated streaming that the district's device controls did not catch or stop.
A filtering tool that quietly stopped filtering
Students were given inadvertent access to YouTube's full, open site through SafeShare, a tool meant to give teachers curated, filtered video links, and began generating their own links to unrestricted content. This happened despite the district's assurance that direct YouTube access was blocked.
This isn't isolated to Sudbury
In a national survey of more than 1,300 teens, nearly a third said they had seen online pornography during the school day, and 44% of that group said they saw it on a device their school issued to them.
Chromebooks named on a national watch list
Google's Chromebook — the device most SPS students use — is on the National Center on Sexual Exploitation's 2026 "Dirty Dozen List," cited for default settings that leave students exposed to pornography, predatory contact, and cyberbullying.
Has your child experienced something like this?
Non-educational games, content unrelated to schoolwork, exposure to something inappropriate — tell us. Every report helps us build the case for change.
Our students deserve better, and we need your voice to ask for necessary changes to SPS policies and practices to make a difference.
Sign the community call to action letter