Is your school blocking LGBT websites?

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The American Civil Liberties Union is encouraging public school students to test their schools' web filters after discovering that schools in Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania and Virginia have been blocking students' access to LGBT-related sites.

"This is not a case where overbroad filters are accidentally filtering out LGBT websites," Joshua Block, an ACLU attorney, said in a statement. "These filters are designed to discriminate and are programmed specifically to target LGBT-related content that would not otherwise be blocked as sexually explicit or inappropriate."

Student members of gay-straight alliance clubs have found they cannot access information from groups such as the Gay-Straight Alliance Network or the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

"None of the other clubs I know of at school have these kinds of roadblocks thrown in their way when they're trying to plan meaningful things for their clubs to do," Brandon Bleau, vice president of the GSA at John Glenn High School in Westland, Mich., said in a statement.

The ACLU says such filtering violates the Equal Access Act, which requires equal access to school resources for all extracurricular clubs, and First Amendment rights to free speech. The ACLU has launched the "Don't Filter Me" campaign and posted a video that explains to students how to report filtering. Reports can be filed here.