CT High School Bans Conservative, Pro-Second Amendment Websites from School Computers
June 22, 2014
By Sara Noble
Andrew Lampart, a student at Nonnewaug High School in Connecticut was given a gun-related assignment for his class “Law and You.” He found that the National Rifle Association, The National Association for Gun Rights, The Blaze, the Connecticut GOP website, the website for a Sarah Palin PAC, Townhall, RedState and other conservative portals of information were blocked by his school’s SonicWALL firewall.
Andrew Lampert
“I used my study hall to research gun control facts and statistics. That is when I noticed that most of the pro-second amendment websites were blocked, while the sites that were in favor of gun control generally were not,” Lampart told Campus Reform.
Moms Demand Action, Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton’s website, the lunatic fringe Center for American Progress website, the Connecticut Democratic Party’s website and other left-leaning information outlets were left unblocked.
“They’re trying to, in my opinion, shelter us from what’s actually going on around the country and around the world by blocking these web sites. It should be the other way around. The web sites should be unblocked so that students can get different viewpoints from different sides of each argument,” Lampart told FoxCT.
Lampart said that he notified his school district’s superintendent of the problem but nothing was done. On Monday, he took his concerns to the local school board.
It ended up back in the Superintendent’s hands, who said this: “Many of the liberal sites accessible to the student fell into the “not rated” category, which was unblocked while many of the conservative sites were in the “political/advocacy group” which is accessible to teachers but not to students. The district is trying to determine the reason for the inconsistency and if the bias is pervasive enough to justify switching to another content filtering provider. The district does not block individual sites, only categories of websites.”
The letter also described a complicated process by which filtering is done. After the firewall filters by category, it is reviewed by the technology department, then another layer of staff, after which teachers can have input. No one noticed the discrepancy? Quite hard to believe.
This alleged review committee is not on the Board of Education’s list of review committees delineated on their school’s website.
It’s unclear whether Lampart’s high school plans to address the problem.
Is this the practice in schools throughout other schools in our nation?
http://www.independentsentinel.com/ct-high-school-bans-conservative-pro-second-amendment-websites-from-school-computers/
