Only 29 states and the District of Columbia require sex education, according to SIECUS’ legislative tracking. Missouri is not one of them. The Rockwood and Wentzville school districts in Missouri were among those The Markup found to be blocking sex education websites. The Markup also identified blocks to sex education websites, including Planned Parenthood, in Florida, Utah, Texas, and South Carolina.
In Manatee County, Florida, students aren’t the only ones who can’t access these sites — district records show teachers are blocked from sex education websites too.
In Forsyth County Schools in Georgia, which blocks a relatively narrow set of categories, records obtained by The Markup reveal a spate of blocked YouTube videos: several about Picasso as well as history videos, a physics lesson, videos of zoo animals, and children’s songs about the seasons and days of the week.
Mike Evans, the district’s chief technology and information officer, said the district tries to apply filters fairly. “We’ll always have different families on one side or another,” Evans said. “Some would rather have things more restricted if they don’t agree with any LGBTQ-type material or video that might be available, but we try to stay away from that type of (filtering) altogether.”
Among the 16 districts that released records about their blocked websites, 13 shared the categories tied to the blocks. Games and social media were the most frequently blocked categories, along with ads, entertainment, audio and video content, and search engines.
Sites labeled “porn” or “nudity” didn’t crack the top 10 categories blocked in any district. Only in Palm Beach County, Florida, and Seattle were they even in the top 20.
In Manatee County, Florida, students in the schools can’t access the local public library catalog; most social media platforms; or sites with audio and video content including Fox Nation, Spotify, and SoundCloud.
The Manatee County district’s chief technology officer, Scott Hansen, described a filtering policy that errs on the side of blocking. If a category isn’t seen as having an explicit educational purpose, it is blocked.
In a survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, nearly three-quarters of students said web filters make it hard to complete assignments. Kristin Woelfel, a policy counsel at CDT, said she and her colleagues started to think of the web filters as a “digital book ban,” an act of censorship that’s as troubling as a physical book ban but far less visible. “You can see whether a book is on a shelf,” she said. By contrast, decisions about which websites or categories to block happen under the radar.
In the Rockwood School District, O’Dell recognizes that web filters prevent students from playing games on their computers, but she doesn’t believe technology should play that role.
“It’s not really teaching kids the responsibility of when to pay attention in class,” she said. “It kind of just takes that entire part of learning completely away.”
