School Officials Censor Starr Web Site

Hate speech, pornography, directions for making bombs.

These are the Web sites Internet filtering companies usually block for high schools.

On Friday, they found themselves filtering the president.

N2H2 in Seattle, which serves several Spokane-area school districts, was in chaos Friday when employees discovered the steamy sex scenes in Kenneth Starr’s report.

“Everybody’s like, what are we going to do?” said manager Jessica Lyman.

Lyman and her colleagues review thousands of new Web sites every day, weeding out those deemed inappropriate for children.

“There isn’t usually this much chaos over one Web site,” she said. “I got to work and we had a big meeting about it.”

While the company isn’t in the habit of filtering government Web sites, employees decided President Clinton’s indiscretions were too racy for teenage eyes.

It proved to be an easy call, said Lyman, referring to detailed accounts of oral sex in the White House. “That’s pretty explicit.”

The company filters sites for Spokane District 81, East Valley, West Valley and Nine Mile Falls districts.

If districts decide they want access to the report after all, they have the authority to override N2H2’s decision, Lyman said.

Most students didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the report Friday afternoon. But administrators expect that by Monday morning, they’ll have their share of curious cruisers.

Kevin Foster, technical coordinator for Spokane public schools, thinks students will eventually have access to a “PG” version of the report, with “some of the salacious detail” edited out.

In Coeur d’Alene, school administrators weren’t too concerned about students discovering the report.

Because the school year just started, very few students are using the computer labs, said Bill Brulotte, vice principal of Coeur d’Alene High School.

At Mt. Spokane High School in Mead, Principal Pete Lewis said he’d decide by Monday how to handle the whole affair.

“Thank goodness for a weekend, huh?”

Staff writer Alison Boggs contributed to this report.