Eleven-year-old network manager Jon Penn  is all business when it comes to upgrading the network at his Sherwood, Ark., private school. Penn says upgrading computers and protecting the environment take priority over accessing applications for personal reasons. Penn recently talked with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie to further explain the reasoning behind his network management decisions and reveal a bit about why he's drawn to technology.

Listen to the Newsmaker of the Week podcast for an audio version of this story .

What can you tell us about your network?

When I came in, the first thing I noticed was that this was a very old system. It was donated to us when I was in first grade so that's about six years ago. At that time, the computers had already been in use for about three years.

What were your priorities when you realized it was an old network?

Once we took a look at it, we realized we didn't have any antivirus on it, so our first priority was going to be to get antivirus programs on the computers.

Why was that important for the environment you were working in?

Because a lot of our teachers and students are not extremely tech savvy and do not know the certain measures that you would normally take to avoid getting viruses.

Did you do anything around spam filters?

Yes we did. We actually bought one system that would handle antivirus, spam and content filtering.

What type of controls did you want to put in with spam and content filtering?

With spam, we basically just wanted to get it out because our teachers, some of them, would get up to 300 messages per day. And with content filtering, we just needed to make sure that they could not go to sites that the school does not approve of on our campus.

What sites would some of those be, and who decides that?

Such as MySpace and some of the chat things because some personal information is put there and they don't want the school held liable for that. Among other things, the photo searches because they eat up a lot of bandwidth.

Were any of your friends against blocking MySpace?

My friends weren't really, because none of them do MySpace or chat really. But there were several people in the class and actually a lot of the staff that were not really pleased about MySpace being blocked.

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