ACLU Warns Gwinnett Schools: Stop Blocking LGBT Websites

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The Gwinnett County (Ga.) Schools have been blocking students’ access to websites supportive of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities, and the American Civil Liberties Union—unsurprisingly—wants them to stop.

Graduating senior Nowmee Shehab, who headed the Gay-Straight Alliance at Brookwood High, discovered the filtering when she was unable to access the group’s own website, reported WSB-TV in Atlanta. Other blocked sites included those of the Georgia Safe Schools Coalition and the It Gets Better Project.

“They are not sites that are pornographic or in any way provide adult content,” said Chara Fisher Jackson, legal director for the ACLU of Georgia. The group sent the school district a letter demanding that it lift the filters or face a possible lawsuit.

Shehab said it was crucial for students to be able to reach the sites at school. “They may not feel safe at home or don’t have a computer at home so it’s very important they be able to access these sites from school,” she said. She told CBS Atlanta that students can reach reparative-therapy websites like Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Exodus International, both of which claim that homosexuals can change their sexual orientation.

Gwinnett Schools spokesman Jorge Quintana sent WSB-TV a statement saying the district was “looking into the concerns raised. Following guidelines from the Children’s Internet Protection Act, the school system does filter internet content. That said, if a student or employee needs access to a site for a legitimate instructional or work purpose they can make a request for that access.”

The Gwinnett incident is the latest case of high schools blocking gay and lesbian websites. On March 28, the ACLU announced it had sent letters to several school districts demanding that they discontinue the practice. Since then, it has threatened legal action against at least a dozen school districts besides Gwinnett for similar policies.

Almost two years prior to the ACLU teaming with the Yale Law School to launch the “Don’t Filter Me” campaign, which asks students to check to see if their school is blocking content, the ACLU of Tennessee successfully fought to have the filtering policy changed in the Knox County Schools, only to discover that the company manufacturing the blocking software had just stopped filtering LGBT sites for several Indiana schools at the schools’ request.