Student: Planned Parenthood / Left-wing sites available Pro-life / Conservative sites blocked

According to this news report Planned Parenthood and other left-wing political websites were accessible at a school website but conservative – pro-life and Christian websites were blocked !

Andrew Lampart says that he was researching gun control in May for his studies at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, but was unable to view the National Rifle Association’s website from a school computer, he told FoxCt.com.

According to Fox News, Lampart claims the issue went even further down the political divide, to issues including abortion and religion. He told the station he had full access to Planned Parenthood’s website, but could not access pro-life groups’ websites. He was also blocked from Christianity.com and the Vatican’s website, but not Islam-guide.com, he said.

The Woodbury school district issued a statement Thursday, saying that it pressed Dell SonicWall, its filtering provider, as to why the liberal websites fell into a “not rated” category and the conservative sites fell into “political/advocacy group” category, barring them from school computers.

“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 statement read. “The district does not block individual sites, only categories of websites. The categories are supposed to be inclusive of all sites that fall into a common description. The district does engage in unblocking sites to provide diverse points of view and balance in the instructional process.”

According to their website, The Dell SonicWALL Content Filtering Service allows administrators to block any site that has not been rated by providing a category called “Not Rated”. It is important to note that Not Rated means that we have not yet had the opportunity to rate the URL. It does not mean that we have reviewed the site and decided to rate it “Not Rated”. Many organizations block the “Not Rated” category since millions of new URLs are introduced monthly and will not make it into the rating queue until there is sufficient traffic or an end user submits the site for rating. Not Rated should be blocked since millions of new malware sites appear monthly.