Web filtering by school districts is the topic of a report issued today by the ACLU of Rhode Island, which filed open-records requests across the state. Portsmouth is one of the schools cited for reliance on "deeply-flawed software" while using "over-extensive" policies that has "hindered teachers from making use of the Internet to educate students and has hampered students from accessing relevant information in the classroom."

According to the report, all districts in RI use the same basic tool, Trustwave M86, provided through the RI Network for Educational Technology (RINET), to implement required filtering in conformance with the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA). But the report also found that beyond the mandated types of blocked content, there exists wide variation in the categories of sites each district makes inaccessible to students. According to the report:

"M86’s “Lifestyles” filter served as a de facto “gay rights filter,” inappropriately blocking sites such as those for the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD). In reaction to ACLU concerns, M86 changed the title of the category to “Lifestyle & Culture,” and revised the description to include more general cultural organizations, potentially dissuading blocking of that category.

Despite this change, two Rhode Island school districts – New Shoreham and Portsmouth – continue to block this category. Thus, for students in these school districts, many positive LGBT websites may remain inaccessible."

According to the ACLU, Portsmouth also blocks web sites in the categories of Comics, Cults, Entertainment, Fashion, Freeware/Shareware, Hate and Discrimination, Humor, Online Communities, Religion, Social Opinion, Virtual Network Computing, Web-based Newsgroups, and Weblogs/Personal pages.

I've sent a query to Portsmouth Supt. Lynn Krizic asking the following questions.

• Would the district care to respond on the record about the specific issue of blocking LGBT sites?
• Second, how does the district defend blocking categories like "Religion," when, according to the report, we are the only district which does?
• Finally, the ACLU recommends that districts review their block lists and make their policies more transparent. Any thoughts on this?

Full disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of the RI ACLU, and I run a "web log" which is probably blocked by this policy.