What is the BEST way to fight these reforms is to OPT OUT your children from the Standardized ASSESSMENTS. If only 10% of students OPT OUT, the assessment results are INVALID.

School districts may threaten students with summer school or remediation in alternative schools like Manchester's Strategic Planning Committee is currently discussing. 

However, districts have no authority to force "objectionable materials" upon your child.  Parents have the right to review and inspect all materials, and opt-out their child.  If no assessment materials are available for parental review, parents have every right to opt-out their child under a recently passed statute:

RSA 186:11 IX-c. Require school districts to adopt a policy allowing an exception to specific course material based on a parent's or legal guardian's determination that the material is objectionable. Such policy shall include a provision requiring the parent or legal guardian to notify the school principal or designee in writing of the specific material to which they object and a provision requiring an alternative agreed upon by the school district and the parent, at the parent's expense, sufficient to enable the child to meet state requirements for education in the particular subject area. The name of the parent or legal guardian and any specific reasons disclosed to school officials for the objection to the material shall not be public information and shall be excluded from access under RSA 91-A.

Two bills were introduced in 2013, requiring that students pass statewide assessments in order to be promoted to the next grade or graduate. Both bills, HB 321 and HB 322, failed to pass.  So while it may still be the prerrogative of the district to impose such requirements, parents can override these stipulations.  Parents have the right to review, inspect and opt-out of objectionable assessment materials.

Action needed: Please contact members of JLCAR before Dec. 19th and demand informed parental consent prior to any behavioral surveys or assessments, including dispositional Common Core aligned assessments, and any psychological treatment of students.

How do you feel about school psychologists surveying and treating your child without your knowledge or consent in a public or private school?  The NH Board of Education is proposing to do so under its "optional" Comprehensive School Psychologist Services, Ed 306.25.  Should a district opt to hire a single school psychologist (and many districts are required to do so to develop Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for special education students), then the entire weight of this program becomes mandatory.

Federal law, PPRA, requires written parental consent for behavioral surveys and assessments, but school districts are not notifying parents or respecting their objections.

Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA)

The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232h; 34 CFR Part 98) applies to programs that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education (ED). PPRA is intended to protect the rights of parents and students in two ways:

It seeks to ensure that schools and contractors make instructional materials available for inspection by parents if those materials will be used in connection with an ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation in which their children participate; and

It seeks to ensure that schools and contractors obtain written parental consent before minor students are required to participate in any ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning:

(1) Political affiliations;
(2) Mental and psychological problems potentially embarrassing to the student and his/her family;
(3) Sex behavior and attitudes;
(4) Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating and demeaning behavior;
(5) Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships;
(6) Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers; or
(7) Income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).

 

Parents or students who believe their rights under PPRA may have been violated may file a complaint with ED by writing the Family Policy Compliance Office. Complaints must contain specific allegations of fact giving reasonable cause to believe that a violation of PPRA occurred. 

All Common Core aligned assessments include dispositional questions, which subjectively measure student values, attitudes and beliefs.  Under the guise of behavior intervention these questions include surveillance on teachers, classmates, educational environment, as well as family lifestyle and self-confession on the part of students themselves.

Surveys include questions on ethnicity, school facilities, technology access, and Counseling services, as well as a series of questions on workforce development, college and career plans.

Workforce inquiry ranges from: if the student plans to finish high school, desires to attend college, if the student’s teachers think the student will go to college as to how much parents or guardians discuss college, jobs, tuition cost, ways to pay for college, degree options, years of college required, getting good grades, specific colleges etc.

This frequently leads back into a bit of Freudian counseling options as to who to go to if you have a problem; then onto more invasive family lifestyle questions including weekend, dinner routine, breakfast habits, child care, travel, and even personal health and exercise.

Not to overlook anything, there are the all too familiar guns, knives and safety issues are probed and the hot topic of bullying is covered at length, leaving no rock unturned. Everyone (student, family, teachers, administrators, classmates, custodians, technology access, facility, community service, health, entertainment, vices, attitudes, workforce development, gender, religion etc ) is fair game on psychological behavioral assessments. Students are asked to provide data on everyone, including themselves.

Students are asked to report on personal smoking, alcohol consumption and illegal drug use, if they have asthma and their use of technology at home.

Why is there no penalty when a school fails to obtain parental consent prior to surveying, let alone treating, a student?  The vast majority of these students are minors.

Should the state Board of Education create mandatory psychological treatment policy, or is this a better left to local districts where parents have greater voice? Or perhaps this issue is disturbing enough to merit statewide debate with our elected legislative officials, not just a few appointed members of the NH Board of Education?

At what point would these dispositional questions, which are subjective measurements of a student's values, opinions or beliefs, trigger psychological treatment?  Here are some excerpts from the proposed rules:

Public Comments to NH Board of Education

on November 21, 2013

The development of Comprehensive School Psychologist Services program under Ed 306.25 is beyond the authority of the Department of Education.

RSA 189:49 provided for “Optional Services,” which “school boards of any school district may provide” to students in public or nonpublic schools inside or outside the district. 

How does a district provide Comprehensive School Psychologist Services to students in a nonpublic school, which is not required to administer assessments?  These rules mandates that psychologists use assessments to diagnose student disorders and plan treatment.

ED 306.25 (d) School psychologists shall utilize assessment findings to diagnose educational and behavioral disorders and to facilitate educational treatment planning.

Where is the requirement that districts obtain informed parental consent before diagnosing and treating minor children and thereby usurping parental rights?  Where is the penalty for failure to obtain consent before treating a minor?

One Board member argued that certain parents may be irresponsible or negligent.  How could the district possibly obtain consent from such parents?

If the district feels so strongly that a parent is irresponsible or negligent, report that parent. Every teacher is a mandatory reporter of abuse and neglect.  Report such parents individually rather than assume that all parents are abusive or negligent and denying their due process rights, including the presumption of innocence.

Without the inclusion of such language the state Board and districts could face lawsuits from parents, especially if psychological treatment results in a harmful situation for a child.  Wouldn’t the district be responsible?

Parents must given the option to use their own psychologist in lieu of a school's psychologist.  There may be a family psychologist.  They may want to insure that HIPAA rules will protect the privacy of the child's records and prevent these records from being shared without parental consent.  FERPA trumps HIPAA in a school setting and we all know that FERPA now allows districts to share, or even sell, student information without parental consent.

Requiring informed consent also provides the district with an opportunity to clarifying what treatment is being proposed and what, if any, liability for future treatment.  Without such disclaimers, a court might find the State or the district liable for the costs of any recommended treatment, especially if parents were never given a notice or choice under Ed 306.25.

The best solution is to strike out Ed 306:25 in its entirety, and not get involved in making mandatory rules for optional services with regard to school psychologists.  Let districts draft their own policies, liability disclaimers, informed consent forms and financial liability disclosures for parents to accept or refuse.

Greetings Concerned Citizens and Neighbors,

Please send this information out to your local school boards....please add your own comments & thoughts. If you need local Hollis or Brookline School Board emails, let me know.  Julie Le Doux

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Dear School Board Members and Officials,

Several weeks ago, Karen Cabral from Pelham spoke at the Manchester, NH School Board meeting when they voted to back away from Common Core. Click here for the video recording of citizen testimony that evening.

She testified about student privacy issues in our schools and, specifically concerning the increasing invasiveness of the "surveys" her 7th grade daughter has been subjected to.

Most of us know how many documents we have to sign relating to health care and HIPAA privacy laws.
Did you know that your student's HIPAA privacy protections end at the school door?

Karen testified that since the FERPA laws were gutted in 2012 at the federal level, any health care information collected at school about your child is unprotected. 

Read this letter from Senator Markey in MA to the US Dept of Education articulates the problems with the changes to the FERPA laws and why our student's personal information is at risk:  -- US Senator Markey, Massachusetts, letter to Duncan on FERPA & data mining.

Karen's daughter has been given FOUR behavioral surveys since the beginning of the school year. One recent survey asked:

     Does your body move while you talk?
     Do you often want to touch what you see?
     Do you want to stomp and slam the door when you are angry?

These may seem innocuous since they are questions that could relate to learning modalities, such as auditory, visual or kinesthetic learning styles. However, they are also the same types of questions asked relating to medical conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, ADD, and anger management issues and dyslexia.

Karen told her daughter not to answer invasive questions at school, however, according to her testimony before the Manchester school board, the teacher stood over her daughter and pressured her to answer.

She asked the Manchester School Board if we are expecting 12 year-old students to have to stand up to their teachers to protect their own privacy?

The bottom line here is this:

If our school boards do NOT proactively defend our students personal privacy rights, who will?

Do our school boards have written privacy policies in place that spell out that NO student information will be released without written parental consent or court order?

This is imperative as the requests for more and more data about our students are increasing.

Here are the 400+ suggested data points established by the US Dept. of Education Website.

Notice items, such as: Academic Delinquencies, Family Income Range, Family Obligations, Father's Educational Level, Immunizations, Religious Affiliations, Various Test Scores, and other information that  families should reasonably be able to consider to be private.

Increased data mining through Common Core assessments will make this even worse.

School Boards must enact clear privacy policies to clear up any confusion. Let's ask them to do this for our students.

AND, HOME EDUCATORS....THIS SHOULD MATTER TO US. Other states are experiencing increasing intrusion into home educators' lives as a result of Common Core and the Federal intrusiveness overall.

Reach out to your school boards and ask them to guarantee your student's privacy IN WRITING.
 

Lisa E. Soronen

NSBA Senior Staff Attorney