Posted on 06/20/2014 3:51:27 PM PDT by NYer
Superintendent Jody Goeler released a statement today responding to the charge that a Woodbury school discriminates against conservative and pro-life websites by blocking them.
Andrew Lampart, a senior at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, told his local Fox station that he discovered a clear political bias at his school, based on which websites are blocked.
His initial discovery was that the National Rifle Association’s website was blocked, but not anti-gun websites. But the more websites Lampart tried to reach, the stranger it got.
“I immediately found out that the State Democrat web site was unblocked but the State GOP web site was blocked,” Lampart told FoxCT.
Lampart checked out websites related to abortion. He discovered that the National Right to Life website was blocked, but not Planned Parenthood or NARAL Pro-Choice America’s websites.
Lampart had similar results when checking out religious websites. Christianity.com and the Vatican’s web site were both blocked, but Islam-guide.com was not.
According to The Daily Caller, each of the blocked sites was struck down by the schools SonicWall filter which labeled them as impermissible “Political/Advocacy Groups” sites.
Censorship is Lampart’s concern. He told Fox, “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.”
Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, sent a letter of protest to the school. “It is alleged that you support censoring students at Nonnewaug High School from accessing the Vatican’s website on the grounds that it promotes ‘hate speech.’ Would you please identify examples of ‘hate speech’ found on the Vatican’s website?”
Lampart discussed the issue with the Superintendent of Woodbury schools, but nothing was done a week later, so Lampart spoke to the Board of Education about it. Board chairman John Chapman told Fox, “It’s not a joking matter in terms of having access to both sides of an issue.”
Chapman sent Fox CT an email saying, “the Board appreciated hearing the comments from Andrew and agree that he has raised an important issue that warrants further investigation.”
Superintendent Jody Goeler posted a response this morning to the school’s website, blaming the Dell SonicWall service they use. Goeler wrote, “As interest in this topic has expanded, the district has pressed Dell SonicWall for more information about how websites are assigned to categories and why there are apparent inconsistencies, as discovered by the student, in classifications particularly along conservative and liberal lines.”
Goeler added, “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.”
Goeler concluded her letter saying, “Once we receive a statement from Dell SonicWall clarifying its process for assigning websites to categories, I will post it on our website for your review at www.ctreg14.org.
LifeNews will follow this story closely and keep you informed on the latest.
If the censorship is actually coming from the school, it wouldn’t be the first time a school has censored pro-life groups. As LifeNews reported this February, Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington was guilty of the posters that their Students for Life club made.
The administration stated that the school policy only allows posters that “do not offend staff or students, put others down if they have a different belief/opinion, or otherwise cause disruption.” WSFL’s posters, the administration maintained, would violate this policy because they promote a message rather than solely promoting the group’s meetings.
Despite this policy, however, the administration has permitted the Wilson Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) to hang flyers, for example, promoting homosexual relationships by showing conjoined male symbols and conjoined female symbols and stating “Love knows no limits.”
This seems to be a clear violation of the federal Equal Access Act, which requires that schools give each student group the same opportunities, without discriminating against any group
Ping!
Any doubt that communists are running the show?
liberal cesspool
It appears that Dell is running the show, at least for now. And Dell, or someone within it, may have been exposed thereby.
Like the emails, this’ll be easy to track if there’s a will to do so.
This country has gotten to the sad state that I would have been surprised if their blocking software had been fair and even handed.
Chicken sheet Liberals. Hey, if your ideas are so great, why would you need to block the others? It’s like cults who won’t let their followers question or find out about any other information so as to keep them in. Geez, Liberalism is indeed a cult if they act the same ways!
We need more parents and students to join this fight. Once the stone is lifted, liberal cockroaches run for cover.
$hit, I see that every day with my web browser, Google. Virtually every conservative website that I connect with has it’s e-mails initially put in the “Junk” category. And even after I mark them as “Not Junk,” they often “mysteriously” revert to their former category subsequently.
Liberal Fascism is a disease.
That is an easy one. Quit using them.
I want an honest debate. We have to stop using the services & products that fund the liberals and their bias.
And they will follow Hussein’s lead-lie, obfuscate and stonewall until the next issue arises, then rinse and repeat. The greater number of issues, the more difficult to focus the opposition.
Goeler concluded her letter... “ Jody is male-—I live in the district
Why do you use anything labeled "google?"
>>>It appears that Dell is running the show, at least for now. And Dell, or someone within it, may have been exposed thereby.<<<
I work at a public school, and I’m familiar with filtering systems used in education. The superintendent is lying.
The law only states that each school district has to have some sort of filter blocking inappropriate or obscene material. It is up to the district itself to determine what is blocked and what is allowed. The filtering software provides many options for each district, and the district can unblock or block anything with a simple directive to an IT employee.
The decision to block sites that the district deemed conservative, Republican, or right-wing is up to the district, not Dell.
In fact, we had a similar little scuffle up here about what is blocked and what is not. The IT director kept telling us, “We have to follow the federal law.” It took a little digging for us to discover that the software vendor gave the district a menu of options, one of which the IT director selected, and his response was his way of saying that he couldn’t be bothered to help the staff.
I like this kid, though. Wish he was in my class.
You’re kidding yourself if you think you can go more than 15 minutes of browsing, or even 15 seconds in some cases, without interacting with Google. In fact, connecting to Freerepublic links you up through Google-Analytics, no matter what browser you’re using, though it can be blocked.
“Why do you use anything labeled “google?”
I’ve tried a number of them. They are all pretty much the same. The liberals have the internet well-infected.
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