Mailbag: ‘Like’ Facebook? Not so sure

I’m a junior at Huntington Beach High School. The purpose of sending this letter is to explain all the challenges that Facebook contains, and what it is doing to our youth.

The average person spends around one to three hours on Facebook every day instead of doing more important things in their social life. I admit that I spend way too much on Facebook and need to learn to control my online habit. Now that social networking sites are worldwide, it seems more youth are jumping on it and at much younger ages.

With accessibility to the sites so easy, it is hard to control who is actually age-appropriate to have an account.

The problem I see with so many youth on Facebook is most of them have academic study time that gets put on hold in order to update their wall or home page daily.

There are status updates with people saying, “If I didn’t have a Facebook, my grades would be so much better than they are now.” That coming from a person who knows what is important in life, but he just doesn’t know how to control the urge to check his status.

The problem with Facebook is it grabs your attention immediately by offering all these interesting apps that allow you to play games, upload information or share info with friends. Something needs to be done.

I encourage a group to be formed that would monitor accounts and teach students how to control the time they spend on a daily basis on Facebook. Would that become an invasion of one’s privacy? Maybe.

It’s a hard question to answer since, many times people deactivate their accounts for a short period of time but eventually come back to them. I have deactivated my Facebook account, but have found myself reactivating it hours later. I hope they eventually put an age restriction on the site, because the grade school kids should not be viewing the social comments of so many high school- and college-age students. Facebook today…who knows what sites will intrigue us tomorrow.

Robert DeBiaso

Huntington Beach

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School postings not a good sign

Schools are public institutions, paid for by the public, supported by the public. The “HBHS Players Only — Keep Off” signs at Huntington Beach High School are so incredibly anti-public and so incredibly anti-local people that they are offensive. In fact, I would think they are offensive to the students who attend Huntington Beach High and are not Huntington Beach High players.

At a time when we need our citizens to understand how valuable schools are and how valuable the athletic facilities are, these signs only do harm. The fields are clearly overwatered, but that is another issue, though the water is paid for by the public.

I understand there are liability issues, but the school is open, and half the time, the gates to the administration building are wide open on the weekends. I understand placing anti-skateboard devices on the low walls to protect them. I understand that at times, fields are taken advantage of, and probably sometimes people do not clean up after themselves or their animals.

But I am the principal of a school and have been for many years. I know that the good that comes from welcoming people far outweighs the damage done by a few. These signs should be replaced with welcoming signs that thank the public for their support and ask folks to care for the wonderful facilities that the public paid for.

I realize it is too much to expect that the track be open for people to use (though hundreds of districts do just that). We put up with the lights and the sound during events, we should be able to use the facilities.

We will be asking the public to pay more for schooling so we can reduce class size, so we can maintain, so we can educate our children, so we can pay all who work at schools more. Signs like these tell the public that we do not care about them and we do not appreciate their support.

We should be as open to the general public as we are to those who pay to use the pool, the gym or the parking lot on Sunday church services.

Dave Mintz

Huntington Beach