Walton County School District

Balancing safety with educational value 

The district's prior filter also lacked the granularity to achieve a “happy balance” between security and educational value for students and staff.

Walton County’s IT team sought to:

• Empower teachers with greater autonomy in managing student internet access during class, without burdening the IT department with numerous unblock requests
• Move beyond a “blanket open for everybody” approach when unblocking educational websites requested by teachers.

The solution: Implementing Linewize Filter and Classwize

Giving IT the best of cloud and on-premise with a hybrid filter

Walton County deployed Linewize’s hybrid filter, combining an on-site appliance with cloud-based filtering protection—ensuring coverage for devices both on and off the school network.

The district also transitioned to what they refer to as a “block all, allow some” approach, to enhance security and make management easier for IT.

Rather than building repetitive policies and manually updating block lists to address new risks, Walton County has set up the filter to default to blocking the majority of sites across the web. Their IT team then maintains a specific “allow list” which is far simpler to keep updated.

Integrating classroom control for teachers, without IT burden

The district also adopted Classwize, which seamlessly integrates with Linewize Filter, to empower teachers with real-time controls over student online activity during class.

Duane Embry, Director of Instruction Technology, emphasized the critical integration between Classwize and Linewize Filter, which allows teachers to temporarily unblock pre-approved websites during class periods without needing IT intervention.

The outcome: Enhanced student safety,
empowered teachers, and streamlined IT operations

Student devices are protected whether at school or home

Linewize Filter has added a crucial layer of defense to Walton County's network security, effectively blocking malicious content and ensuring a safer online environment for students and staff.

Kobos says the filter also serves as an additional layer to their security stack, working cohesively with the firewall. “From a security side of things, we utilize the filtering component of Linewize to put in malicious IPs and malicious domains.”

Teachers have autonomy in the classroom, and rely less on IT

“We used to spend a lot of time, especially when August and September rolled around, fielding requests from teachers to unblock various sites,” says Kobos. “Not anymore.”

“With Classwize, they can go in there and have some of that control, while it still gives us a default security baseline,” Kobos explains.

IT can keep a site blocked by default, while still giving teachers the ability to temporarily allow access during class. Teachers can tailor access to specific classes, periods, or even individual students. 

Improved visibility into student online activity

Linewize Student Journey reports provide clear, concise insights into student online behavior—as opposed to prior tools which generated large, unwieldy CSV files, making it difficult to comb through student activity data.

This enhanced visibility allows administrators and teachers to quickly identify potential issues, supporting proactive intervention and informed decision-making.

Features like the “Monitor only” option in Classwize allow administrators and teachers to keep an eye on individual students who may be at risk of distraction.

Exceptional support and training from Linewize

“The support team has always been fantastic,” Kobos says, praising the Linewize team’s responsiveness, dedication, and patience in resolving issues.

“If you can have something resolved in chat the same day, that’s always the best case scenario. It doesn’t always happen, but 99% of the time, it’s resolved in chat.”

Embry emphasized Linewize’s comprehensive knowledge base, which has contributed to teachers’ smooth  adoption of Classwize.

“The training doesn’t take that long. It’s easy to point staff to the Linewize Knowledge Base, and most of the time, that takes care of their issue and we’re good to go.”