A Connecticut high school senior is crying foul after discovering that the school's firewall was set to block certain conservative websites from being accessible.
Andrew Lampart made the discovery last month at Nonnewaug High School when he was conducting research for a debate on gun control.
He tried to access the National Rifle Association's website, but it was blocked.
"So, I went over to the other side," he told WTIC on Tuesday. "And I went over on [pro-gun control] sites such as Moms Demand Action or Newtown Action Alliance and I could get on these Web sites but not the others."
Finding the discrepancy suspicious, the 18-year-old decided to dig deeper.
"I immediately found out that the State Democrat web site was unblocked but the State GOP web site was blocked," he said.
Lampart also discovered that pro-life websites were blocked, but Planned Parenthood and Pro-Choice sites were available. Christianity.com and the Vatican's website were prohibited, but Islam-guide.com was accessible.
The Woodbury student said that it is wrong for the school to censor information.
"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," Lampart told WTIC.
"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."
Regional School District No. 14 Superintendent Jody Ian Goeler released a statement Thursday explaining how the district blocks internet content.
"The filtering service provider, Dell SonicWall, reviews websites using artificial intelligence and human observation and assigns websites to a category," Goeler wrote.
"The district then convenes a technology committee, which reviews the categories and determines which ones should provide unrestricted access to students. The committee also identifies another smaller layer of categories accessible to staff that may contain materials appropriate for instruction.
"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 superintendent explained. " 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 superintendent also emphasized that individual sites are not blocked, only certain categories, like political/advocacy."
Goeler stated that when Dell SonicWall better explains their process for categorizing sites, the information will be posted on the district's website.
