The American Civil Liberties Union said last week it has settled a lawsuit with a Missouri school district whose Internet-filtering software was blocking access to nonsexual websites about sexuality issues.
The ACLU said the Camdenton R-III district agreed to stop blocking the sites, submit to monitoring, and pay $125,000 in legal fees.
As part of a national campaign, the ACLU sued the district last summer in federal court in Jefferson City on behalf of organizations whose websites had been blocked. The organizations include the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays National, a Washington advocacy group.
The district’s lawyer, Thomas Mickes, said he thought the district eventually would have prevailed, but that continuing with the lawsuit would have been too costly.
