K–12 | Daily Report

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A Northern California high school district is no longer restricting access to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy websites after the American Civil Liberties Union recently intervened on behalf of a student.

"I wanted to start a gay-straight alliance at my school,” said Melina Zancanella, a 16-year-old junior at Oroville High School, which is in the Oroville Union High School District. "And I wanted to get some information on how to start it. I thought the best place to look was at school. I was searching these websites and I knew they were appropriate. However, they were all blocked.”

Zancanella decided to go to the ACLU after she sent a complaint letter to the Butte County Office of Education but never got a reply. On May 18 the ACLU sent a demand letter to the district, which unblocked the sites a few days later.

The district superintendent's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Oroville High, at the base of the Sierra Nevada Foothills north of Sacramento, is just one of many schools around the country that has blocked LGBT content using web-filtering software designed to prevent students from accessing pornographic material.

“It’s a problem under both the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act. These programs are filtering out LGBT websites but allowing access to websites that condemn homosexuality, like Family Research Council and People Can Change,” said Elizabeth Gil, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.

Web-filtering software organizes websites into categories, but it’s up to school officials to decide whether to block a particular category of websites.

Oroville Union uses a company called M86 Security that groups LGBT websites into a category called “Lifestyle”. By selecting that category, Oroville Union had blocked the websites for many organizations, including the Gay Straight Alliance Network, Campus Pride, Day of Silence, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Many schools have been quick to remove the filters after being contacted, said Joshua Block, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s national LGBT Rights Campaign. He has been working on the ACLU's Don't Filter Me Initiative aimed at ending Internet censorship.

Block has received complaints about 76 schools nationwide. In several cases he tried to determine who made the decision to activate the filter. But he hasn’t been able to get a clear response from any school officials as to whether it was an administrator, a technician, or someone else.

“Anyone that takes the time to look at it can tell it wouldn’t be appropriate to block," he said.

However, Block said he believes many schools didn’t know they were filtering content that is not pornographic. “Once they find out, they realize not only does it not serve the student’s rights but also it doesn’t serve their own educational interests,” he said.

Texas has the most LGBT censorship complaints in the country. Block said the ACLU recently contacted five schools in Texas, four of which “have taken steps to fix the problem.”

Oroville Union is the only school district in California the ACLU has formally contacted for blocking LGBT content. The Civil Liberties Union is currently investigating five other schools in the state, Block said.

M86 Security did not respond to an inquiry as to why it offers a category that filters LGBT advocacy websites.

At least one web-filtering software company – Lightspeed Systems – recently announced it would remove its LGBT category, called “Education Lifestyles,” from its web-filter software. The issue was brought to the company's attention by the ACLU campaign, said company spokeswoman Amy Bennett.

“We decided it was the best thing to do for our customers and students," she said. "We want to categorize these sites in the fairest way possible.”

LGBT web-filtering is the latest twist in the ongoing debate over the role of homosexuality in public schools curriculums. On one side, people have argued that talking about gay and lesbian issues in schools exposes children to inappropriate material at too young an age. On the other, people have pointed out banning such discourse promotes discrimination of youth who already feel isolated due to their sexual orientation.

According to a recent finding in the medical journal Pediatrics, LGBT teens are five times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers. However, the journal found gay, lesbian and bisexual students were less likely to take their own lives if they went to a school with a Gay-Straight Alliance or anti-discrimination policies.