Tennessee Districts Sued For Blocking GLBT Sites

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By Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 05/20/2009

A media specialist and several high school students are suing two school districts in Tennessee for unconstitutionally blocking access to online information about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) issues.

Librarian Karyn Stort-Brinks, students Keila Franks and Emily Logan, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee against the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Knox County Schools. Franks and Logan attend Hume-Fogg High School in Nashville.

The districts, along with 105 other districts in the state, use filtering software provided by Educational Networks of America, which automatically filters the term “GLBT,” including well-known organizations such as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN), and Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

Meanwhile, the filters don’t block sites containing pornography or sites that offer “reparative therapy,” a practice that’s been denounced as dangerous and harmful to young people by the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association.

"Allowing access to Web sites that present one side of an issue while blocking sites that present the other side is illegal viewpoint discrimination," says Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group and lead attorney on the case. "This discriminatory censorship does nothing to make students safe from material that may actually be harmful, but only hurts them by making it impossible to access important educational material."

Stort-Brinks, a librarian at Fulton High School in Knoxville and faculty sponsor for the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), would have preferred that the situation be resolved through dialogue. But the district has ignored her pleas to unblock the GLBT sites since August 2007.

School librarian Karyn Stort-Brinks is one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

Last month, Stort-Brinks, along with Andrew Emitt, 17, of Knoxville Central High School, and Eric Austin, a senior at Hume-Fogg High School, all separately contacted the ACLU for help. The ACLU, in turn, gave the districts a few weeks to remedy the situation. Knox County Schools never responded by the April 29 deadline, and Mary E. Johnston of the legal department of Nashville County responded in a letter dated May 6, 2009 saying that they were examining the “ramifications of the request,” which included many issues to consider including possible extra costs to the district.

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee, stated that the districts have failed to make a “good faith effort” to resolve the issue.

According to Weinberg, all three plaintiffs have a “passion for the First Amendment” and agreed to go forward with the litigation.

“It was an easy decision,” Stort-Brink told School Library Journal. “I just considered the positive effects it will have on all students throughout Tennessee.”

The lawsuit charges that blocking GLBT sites violates students' First Amendment rights. Further, the filtering hinders the ability of Gay Straight Alliances and their members to facilitate club activities and also keeps students from accessing important information, such as research for school-related assignments.  

The legal department of Nashville County says they have yet to be served with the lawsuit.