Witchcraft Sites Deemed Off- Limits to Wisconsin Student

Staff -- School Library Journal, 7/1/1998

One evening last December, Burklin Nielsen went to her high school library to use its new computer lab, which is open after school to students and the general public. Nielsen looked up Web sites about Wicca, a nature-centered religion sometimes called witchcraft. She looked at similar sites the next night, only this time, she said, the library monitor told her to log off.

The same thing happened two or three more times, said Nielsen, a 15-year-old student at Winter High School in rural Winter, Wisconsin. "The library aide told me I couldn't be on there and that our principal said we could only look at Christian-based sites," she said.

Nielsen complained first to the principal, then to the superintendent, who, she said, told her to go before the board of education. After her visit, she said the board directed the superintendent to draft an Internet use policy. Passed in May, the policy applies to in-school Internet use and bars students from accessing "controversial materials." (The district is working on an after-school policy.) It's drawn criticism for violating students' First Amendment rights and pulled the tiny Winter school district into a controversy covered by the Associated Press and the New York Times.

Nielsen's parents have hired a lawyer to represent them. The attorney, Lucy Dalglish, said that schools have the right to impose certain restrictions on student Internet use--during class time, for instance. But Winter's policy is far too vague, Dalglish said, apparently giving the adult in charge discretion to tell students to log off religion sites like those Nielsen accessed.

"If during study hall and lunch hour, you let kids play solitaire and look up their favorite baseball teams, you've got to let them look up Buddhism and Judaism. You cannot discriminate based on religion," said Dalglish, whose Minneapolis law firm, Dorsey and Whitney, has taken the Nielsens' case pro bono.

The librarian at Winter High School, Rolinda Langham, said she had been told to refer all questions to the superintendent, David Scarpino.Scarpino has denied that anyone ever told Nielsen she could view only Christian sites. In addition, he now denies that Nielsen was ever told she couldn't look at certain sites. And he said the district's new policy was not at all related to the controversy. "No student has been taken off the Internet, no student has been denied access, no student was told they could only look up certain sites," he said.

But at least one school board member, Hazel Ryan, contradicted Scarpino in a published report. Quoted in the New York Times, Ryan acknowledged that the school board wrote its policy partly in response to Nielsen's activities. She also said it was her understanding that the Web sites were considered inappropriate because they were "into stuff beyond magic and witchery" and that Nielsen was "not looking up what most people consider religion."--A.G.