By ROBERT LINNEHAN | The Voorhees Sun
A local mom looking to make the Internet a safer place for her 8-year-old daughter won $20,000 for the Signal Hill Elementary School. Representatives from Symantec presented her with a $20,000 check through its Norton Cyber Safe Challenge.
Kim Stroemel accepted the check for her grassroots work to sign up more than 300 parents for OnlineFamily.Norton, a free software program that lets parents establish house rules for kids and monitor activities from any Internet-connected device. Colleen McKenna, director of marketing for Symantec, presented the award to Stroemel.
Stroemel signed up Signal Hill Elementary for the nationwide contest and she was able to rally the most downloads of the program, more than any other school that had signed up across the country.
“I decided to enter us, and through the work of the PFA board we called everyone in school and got everyone in school to download it. Almost 300 signed up for the program,” she said. “When it comes to their computers, people can be afraid of doing a free download, even from a company as well known as Norton. There was a lot of skepticism. It worked out for us though.”
Stroemel received word of the contest through an email from a company called PTO Today, touting the program’s safety and describing the contest.
She was actually looking for a similar program to use to keep her daughter safe while she was surfing the Internet, so Stroemel downloaded the program and found it to be incredibly helpful.
She brought the contest and the program to the PFA board and it was well received, she said. From there it was only a matter of spreading the word to other parents throughout the district and have them sign up for the security software.
“Everyone worked together. Our kids, their parents, all got the word out about the contest and the program. We had parents on the soccer field passing out information, parents making phone calls, parents at ballet classes, we just really tried to get the word out,” Stroemel said. “It all happened so fast. I signed us up for the contest in mid-October and on Nov. 18 we received word that we had won the $20,000 grand prize.”
The $20,000 grand prize will go toward improving Signal Hill Elementary’s playground, Stroemel said. Blacktop will likely be installed near the playground as well, she said, so students can play outside even after there has been a storm.
Typically, water will sometimes pool on and near the playground after a bad rainstorm, she said.
The program lets parents view what Web sites their children are surfing when online, she said. It also blocks material that the parents deem as inappropriate. It’s a shame, she said, that children can surf for something as innocent as “High School Musical,” and be inundated with adult pictures because one of the stars in the production posed nude.
The program can also limit the amount of time a child spends on the computer and monitor what they post on social networking sites, she said.
“This software blocks these types of programs, you can limit the amount of time they have on the computer as well,” she said. “You can block them from Facebook altogether, or allow them to go there and see what they’re posting.
“You have the ability to check almost everything they do on the computer.”
