Tennessee Schools Unblock LGBT Websites Following Lawsuit
Just two weeks after the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee filed suit against the Knox County and Metro Nashville school districts for filtering access to digital information about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered issues, the schools have stopped blocking the websites of gay-friendly advocacy groups such as the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Because the two school systems share the filter with 80% of the other districts in Tennessee, the action has resulted in providing access to gay-interest information for more than 100 school systems throughout the state.
“I’m really happy that the schools are finally making our web access fair and balanced,” said plaintiff Bryanna Shelton, a student at Knoxville’s Fulton High School, in a prepared statement, alluding to the schools permitting access to sites about ex-gays that promote reparative therapy. ACLU of Tennessee staff attorney Tricia Herzfeld cautioned that the civil-rights group is not yet dropping the lawsuit until it receives “assurances from both school boards in this case that they will respect students’ rights and refrain from this sort of censorship in the future.”
The announcement about the change in filtering policy was made June 3 by Knox County Schools Superintendent Jim McIntyre, who said that filter-maker Education Networks of America had adjusted its black-list settings. “We began working to find a solution to this issue, in good faith, as soon as it was brought to our attention, and our efforts were actively under way long before the legal action recently taken,” McIntyre stated, according to the June 4 Knoxville News Sentinel. Olivia Brown of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools told American Libraries that the filtering subcommittee of ENA’s customer advisory council had recommended “unblocking sites that are informational in nature, while keeping blocks on sites that contain content that violate additional policy rules, such as mature content, chat, or personals.”
The press statement from the ACLU’s Tennessee chapter also explained that, in the process of the plaintiffs’ legal counsel verifying that ENA’s Blue Coat black-list settings had been modified as announced, it was discovered that ENA had also just unblocked the LGBT category for school systems in Indiana.
—Beverly Goldberg, American Libraries Online
Posted on June 9, 2009.