BETHLEHEM — One local mother first grew suspicious last September when her eighth grader, at Bethlehem Middle School, suddenly volunteered to stay late three days per week for after-school homework help periods.

“In past years, he disliked having to stay after for homework and extra help. I quickly became leery of his reasons, and asked his teacher to check on his work,” said the parent, whose name is being withheld by the Times Union.

It turned out that the boy hadn’t been doing homework but instead was browsing through racy websites on the Chromebook the school had issued to him.

“A lot of parents aren’t even aware of this,” his mother said.

There had been other problems. During the last school year, her then-third grader, accidentally navigated to person.com, which appears to be a soft-porn chatroom, while searching for a site with a similar sounding name.

The principal spotted that one and called the boy into her office. “He pretty much got scolded for this, like it was his fault that he didn’t immediately report it to the teacher,” she recalled.

The issue of kids reaching inappropriate sites on school computers isn’t limited to Bethlehem.

While the state School Boards Association says they’ve received no complaints about the phenomenon, there have been scattered reports in schools as far flung as Connecticut, Rhode Island, Washington state and Australia.

Bethlehem officials said they couldn’t comment since this involved just one student.

“From the preliminary information I have gathered, it appears this is an isolated incident,” Bethlehem district spokeswoman Jo Ellen Gardner said. “With student privacy in mind, the district will not comment on an issue that involves one student.”

The mother, who says her family is religious, conceded that some of the sites may not be hard-core pornography. Among the sites she’s found on her kids’ web browsing histories are those for the lingerie store Victoria’s Secret and anime videos such as Bikini Warriors.

But she says she’s also seen adult sites accessed through YouTube, despite a filter the district has for that video channel.

Either way, her concerns point to some of the sticky issues that schools will increasingly have to confront as they rely more and more on web-based communications.

For one thing, she said the family’s cell phone costs have increased since they rely on the hot spots when their kids want to do homework on their Chromebooks.

The Bethlehem district’s website outlines the protections in place to guard against inappropriate web browsing on the 3,500 Chromebooks given to their students in Grades 3-12.

Even the protections can be problematic though.

In Rhode Island, the state branch of the ACLU last year contended that student privacy could be violated when school officials track the browsing patterns of students.

It wasn’t clear if Bethlehem was actually tracking student browsing.

And the eighth-grader's mother observed that the school has spoken a lot about teaching kids to avoid inappropriate websites.

“The superintendent said we’ll we need to do a better job at teaching our kids to make good choices,” said the parent, who has had several meetings with school officials over the past year.

But she added: “When we teach our kids about drugs we don’t hand them drugs and say, ‘Yeah — hold on to this. Don’t use it.’ "

As it stood on Monday, the mother said she had successfully lobbied to let her eighth grader turn in his Chromebook and rely on printouts for homework and other assignments, despite the paperless policy.

And she was told the school is looking at further filtering the websites that students can access.

As for that homework that most kids do on their computers, she said her youngster had no assignments left to complete after the school day. “He said he did it all at school,” she said.

Note: An earlier version of this story identified the mother by name, who spoke to the paper on the record and agreed to be photographed. After a number of readers complained, the Times Union decided to remove that information.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU