Lawrence County School System: Why Student Safety Led This District Back to GoGuardian
Lawrence County School System is a rural district in southern Tennessee serving approximately 6,600 students across 14 schools. With roughly 9,000 Chromebooks in circulation, as well as Windows and Mac labs, digital oversight is a critical part of daily operations.
Eric Craig, IT specialist and Google admin, is influential in overseeing the district’s management of student devices, supporting teachers, and ensuring students can access instructional content without being exposed to inappropriate or harmful material.
For years, GoGuardian played a central role in that balance. As the district’s needs and financial priorities evolved, leaders began exploring alternatives, ultimately deciding to pursue a different solution with what they hoped were comparable capabilities.
What followed reshaped how the district evaluates technology decisions, particularly when student safety is involved.
The challenge
Blocksi persuaded Lawrence County to leave GoGuardian by promising comparable filtering, classroom management, and device-tracking capabilities at a discounted rate. After months of research, the district made the switch.
Those expectations went unmet quickly.
“Within the first week, we saw students accessing things GoGuardian would have blocked. There were workarounds. We could eventually block things, but it was extremely laborious,” Eric said. The most concerning problems, however, involved student safety.
Elementary students, who are not permitted to access YouTube, were able to bypass restrictions entirely, leading to a deeper investigation that revealed more serious failures with Blocksi.
Eric and one of his colleagues, Colton Blankenship, met with school administrators and asked a second grader to demonstrate how they were bypassing restrictions. The student was able to show, step by step, how to work around the Chrome extension and log directly into YouTube with no filtering in place. While logged in, Eric tested proxies and confirmed the activity bypassed both extension-level and DNS-level blocking.
The plan
Initially, the LCSS Technology team attempted to resolve the issues through configuration changes and vendor support. It became clear, however, that gaps in Blocksi’s onboarding guidance left critical setup steps unclear, which later surfaced as operational problems requiring additional work by the district.
When the experience with the second-grader revealed how easily safeguards could be bypassed, the LCSS Technology team escalated the concern to the Director of Schools, emphasizing that student safety had to be the top priority.
The district then made the decision to return to GoGuardian.
The impact
Within the first week of returning to GoGuardian, the district began seeing student activity that had gone undetected before. During a brief overlap where both systems were active, the contrast in visibility and accuracy became clear. “We saw students accessing things with Blocksi that GoGuardian would have blocked,” Eric explained.
Tasks that once took an hour, such as investigating a student’s online behavior and updating policies, now take closer to 20–30 minutes. Overall, Eric’s workload has dropped by roughly 30–40%. “With GoGuardian Admin, being able to immediately click into the editor, add something, and apply it across multiple policies at the same time makes things much easier.”
Teachers noticed the difference as well. When GoGuardian was reinstated, Eric received thank-you emails, GIFs, videos, and even a recording of the Hallelujah Chorus in celebration. Staff who relied heavily on classroom management tools expressed relief and renewed confidence.
Conclusion
Looking back, Eric describes the experience as a hard-earned lesson in evaluating technology beyond surface-level promises and short-term savings.
Returning to GoGuardian restored confidence across the district, from teachers and administrators to executive leadership. Administrators gained direct access to smart alerts and detailed student online activity, reducing classroom disruptions and dependency on IT for every investigation. Teachers regained tools that helped keep students engaged and on task, and the IT team recovered time, accuracy, and peace of mind.