Recently, the first year students in the Stafford Technical Center Public Safety Services Class became nationally certified as trainers in the area of internet safety. The training was provided by Paul Faenza, a retired NYPD Sgt. who is a master trainer through I-SAFE and is presently employed by the Black River Area Coalition. I- SAFE is the largest and most well-known source for internet safety materials and training.
The train the trainer course that the students took had four main components; the students can offer any or all of the components in any trainings that they do in the future. The first element was cyberbullying, which is using a computer to harass someone else. This is most commonly done by teens that pick on another; sometimes, like in the case that occurred a few years ago in Essex, where fellow students harassed a teenager to the point where he committed suicide. Just recently, on the national scene, a mother was indicted in a similar case, where she allegedly harassed a classmate of her daughter until, she, too, killed herself.
The second component of the class deals with illegal downloading and file sharing. The class had clips from stars of music and film who explained that their work was their intellectual property, and then when people illegally download and file share, that the artists, composers and performers all suffer personal financial losses. The class also makes people aware of the significant penalties that you can incur for doing this.
The third area of concern is viruses, and other things that can damage or destroy computers. People who send viruses out to wreak their damage on others are hard to understand; they do it for the warped enjoyment that they get by hurting people who are strangers to them.
Lastly, hacking, identity theft and internet scams are all too common. Most of us have received one or more “Nigerian scams”, where someone from Nigeria says that he has just come into a large sum of money (often under questionable legal circumstances), and would be happy to share that with you, if you provide a much smaller sum of money as a show of good faith. Of course, people who send the money never get anything in return. Others have purchased items through the internet only to find that they got nothing in return, or got something completely different than what they ordered. Even more sinister are scams that steal your credit card numbers and other personal identification, thus allowing the thieves to steal your identity in order to access your bank accounts and credit.
The students who are now certified to provide this training to others are: Justin Franklin and Amber Fischer from Rutland High School, Dustin Stone, Nikki Greenier, Aleea Dauphinais, and Trisha Bush from Mill River Union High School, Joel Galvin from Fair Haven Union High School, Cassy Sourdiff, and Brandi Heath from Otter Valley Union High School, and John Blanchard, Brenda Corbett, and Roger Brown, Jr. from Poultney High School. The students are now available to do presentations to school groups, Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, church youth groups and other groups that would benefit from this program.