Iowa ACLU joins fight of Arkansas ‘indoctrination’ law

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Representatives from Impero did not return repeated calls and emails requesting comment about ContentKeeper for this story.

Securly's vice president of marketing, Joshua Mukai, said only that "the Sexual Content category helps schools avoid overblocking websites related to reproductive health or sexual orientation by enabling them to create policies that specifically allow sites discussing sexual topics for age-appropriate groups." He offered no comment on the idea that blocking LGBTQ+ advocacy websites through the "sexual content" category is discriminatory.

Reproductive Health Maya Perez, a senior in Fort Worth, Texas, is the president of her high school's Feminist Club, and she and her peers create presentations to drive their discussions. But research often proves nearly impossible on her school computer. She recently sought out information for a presentation about health care disparities and abortion access.

"Page after page was just blocked, blocked, blocked," Perez said. "It's challenging to find accurate information a lot of times."

She resorted to looking things up on her phone and then typing notes into her computer, which was "really inefficient," she said. "I just wish I had access to more news sites and informational sites."

In response to a request for records of blocked websites through November, the Fort Worth Independent School District released only two days' worth of blocking, showing the five most frequently blocked domains (Spotify, Facebook, TikTok, Roku, and Instagram) as well as a list of categories blocked. "Abortion" did not show up as a blocked category, but search engines were blocked more than 4,500 times, education websites were blocked about 3,800 times, and news websites were blocked 648 times.

Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country end up negotiating directly with local school districts to unblock their website, according to Julia Bennett, the nonprofit's senior director of digital education and learning strategy. Some schools say yes, some no.

Alison Macklin spent almost 20 years as a sex educator in Colorado; at the end of her lessons she would tell students that they could find more information and resources on plannedparenthood.org. "Kids would say, 'No, I can't, miss,'" she remembered. She now serves as the policy and advocacy director for SIECUS, a national nonprofit advocating for sex education.

Only 29 states and the District of Columbia require sex education, according to SIECUS' legislative tracking. Missouri is not one of them. The Rockwood and Wentzville school districts in Missouri were among those The Markup found to be blocking sex education websites. The Markup also identified blocks to sex education websites, including Planned Parenthood, in Florida, Utah, Texas, and South Carolina.

In Manatee County, Florida, students aren't the only ones who can't access these sites — district records show teachers are blocked from sex education websites too.

The Breadth of the Internet Like Perez, Rockwood School District sophomore Brooke O'Dell most frequently runs into blocked websites when doing homework. Sometimes she can't access PDFs she wants to read. Her workaround is to pull out her phone, find the webpage using her own cellular data, navigate to the file she wants, email it to herself, and then go back to her school-issued Chromebook to open it. When it's website text she's interested in, O'Dell uses the Google Drive app on her phone to copy-and-paste text into a Google Doc that she can later access from her Chromebook. She recently had to do this while working on a literary criticism project about the book "Jane Eyre."

Recounting her frustration, O'Dell bristled at the need for any web filter at all.

"While you're in school, they are in charge of you," she said, "but that doesn't mean they need to control everything you're doing."

In Forsyth County Schools in Georgia, which blocks a relatively narrow set of categories, records obtained by The Markup reveal a spate of blocked YouTube videos: One video shows a person reading a novel about Pablo Picasso. Another, a clip of Picasso himself painting. A third is an analysis of the painting "Guernica," and a final one describes Picasso's life and impact. Besides inhibiting Picasso research, the filter stopped other internet users in the district from history videos, a physics lesson, videos of zoo animals, and children's songs about the seasons and days of the week.

Among the 16 districts that released records about their blocked websites, 13 shared the categories tied to the blocks. Games and social media were the most frequently blocked categories, along with ads, entertainment, audio and video content, and search engines.

Sites labeled "porn" or "nudity" didn't crack the top 10 categories blocked in any district. Only in Palm Beach County, Florida, and Seattle were they even in the top 20.

The School District of Manatee County blocks its internet more broadly than almost any other district The Markup analyzed. Internet users in Manatee were blocked from accessing dictionary websites, Google Scholar, academic journals, church websites, and a range of news outlets, including Teen Vogue, Fox News, and a Tampa Bay TV station, according to the records. Manatee's chief technology officer, Scott Hansen, said many of those websites are available to students and staffers but not guests on the district's network, such as outside students working on homework during downtime over long sports tournaments or other events. Still, Manatee students can't access the local public library catalog; most social media platforms; or sites with audio and video content including Fox Nation, Spotify, and SoundCloud.

As Deneau explained in the Rockwood School District, Hansen described a filtering policy in Manatee that errs on the side of blocking. If a category isn't seen as having an explicit educational purpose, it is blocked.

Hansen started working in school district IT before CIPA required filters. "In the early days, they were all terrible," he said. "They created lots of challenges, but their intent was good and they were needed." Now, by contrast, Hansen said the most widely used filters do a good job of properly categorizing the internet, which limits the complaints he hears from teachers; few instructors actually request that sites get unblocked.

While that may be true, interviews with students and teachers around the country indicate many of them have simply resigned themselves to being kept from much of the internet. Students don't necessarily know they can ask that sites get unblocked, and many who do make the request have been denied. The overarching rationale for the filters—keeping students safe—seems unimpeachable, so few people try to fight them. And schools, after all, have the right to limit what they make available online. CIPA lets the FCC refuse internet subsidies to school districts that don't filter out porn, but the law doesn't identify any consequence for excessive filtering, giving districts wide latitude to make their own decisions.

In the Center for Democracy and Technology's survey, nearly three-quarters of students said web filters make it hard to complete assignments. Even accounting for youthful exaggeration, 57 percent of teachers said the same was true for their students.

Kristin Woelfel, a policy counsel at CDT, said she and her colleagues started to think of the web filters as a "digital book ban," an act of censorship that's as troubling as a physical book ban but far less visible. "You can see whether a book is on a shelf," she said. By contrast, decisions about which websites or categories to block happen under the radar.

When Rockwood started using ContentKeeper a few years ago, O'Dell noticed that the filtering became more restrictive. While she recognizes that the blocking prevents students from playing games on their computers, she doesn't believe technology should play that role.

"It's not really teaching kids the responsibility of when to pay attention in class," she said. "It kind of just takes that entire part of learning completely away."

A Stubborn Status Quo The American Library Association has been calling for a more nuanced approach to filtering the internet in schools and libraries since 2003, when it failed to convince the Supreme Court that CIPA is unconstitutional. In that case, the ALA argued that the filters violate public library patrons' right to receive information, a constitutional protection legal scholars trace back to the 1940s. The Supreme Court has upheld the concept multiple times since then, arguing that the First Amendment protects not only the right to speak but the right to receive information and ideas. In the 2003 case, however, the Supreme Court ruled that, as long as people 17 and older could request a website be unblocked, the filters did not unduly limit internet users' constitutional rights.

Though CIPA makes clear that school districts only have to block a narrow sliver of the internet, it does leave schools with the power to determine what else is inappropriate for their students. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education lamented that filters put up barriers "to the rich learning experiences that in-school Internet access should afford students." Shortly after the Department of Education complained about the law's impact, the FCC emphasized that school districts should not set up blanket blocks on social media websites.

Yet in more than a decade, districts have had no additional federal guidance about what they owe students online. And The Markup investigation showed that many districts are flouting the limited existing guidelines; almost all districts blocked some social media sites in their entirety. And only three out of 16 school districts analyzed by The Markup let students directly request sites be unblocked. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, said schools that refuse to field such requests are potentially infringing on students' constitutional rights.

Caldwell-Stone called CIPA "a handy crutch" for censorship that is not justified by the law. "The FCC makes it clear that it's not [justified], but there's no remedy for the kind of activity other than going to court," she said, which is too expensive and time-consuming for many families.

Lawsuits also have limited reach, often changing behavior in only one small part of the country at a time. Rockwood School District has a filter doing what the ACLU sued Camdenton for over a decade ago and the two districts are in the same state, just 150 miles apart. Battling discrimination carried out via web filters is like a game of whack-a-mole in a nation where much of the decision-making is left to more than 13,000 individual school districts.

Bob Deneau, the chief information officer at Rockwood, said he wasn't aware of the Camdenton case or that the district's filter policies might be a legal liability.

And besides the cases where filters explicitly block one viewpoint while allowing another—as with LGBTQ+-related content in Rockwood and Katy—the question of what students have a right to see is only getting murkier. In 2023 alone, the American Library Association tracked challenges to more than 9,000 books in school libraries nationwide.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Schools could use the wide latitude the FCC leaves them to take a more hands-off approach to web filtering. In Georgia's Forsyth County, where books have been banned from school libraries, Mike Evans, the district's chief technology and information officer, said websites have not been involved in the controversy.

"We'll always have different families on one side or another," Evans said. "Some would rather have things more restricted if they don't agree with any LGBTQ-type material or video that might be available, but we try to stay away from that type of [filtering] altogether."

Forsyth County Schools does not have a block category for LGBTQ+ resources.

In Texas, meanwhile, Katy ISD grad Cameron Samuels co-founded Students Engaged in Advancing Texas to fight for open access to information statewide. The group supported a bill, introduced by state Rep. Jon Rosenthal last year, that would prohibit schools from blocking websites with resources for students about human trafficking, interpersonal or domestic violence, sexual assault, or mental health and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ individuals. It didn't go anywhere, but Samuels hopes it will in the future—especially because new board members in Katy ISD could mean the websites Samuels fought so hard to unblock get blocked once again.

"Censorship," Samuels said grimly, "is a winning issue right now."

This story was produced by The Markup and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.

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