COMensarations
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Which One Can You Talk about in Grammar School? Sex, Religion, Politics
Parents only think they’re in control, according to the courts.
Parents in California have been told by the courts they have no right to due process or privacy concerning what their children are told in school. A volunteer mental health worker gave elementary students a survey which included questions about sex. The parents had been asked to give their consent beforehand, but had not been told what the content of the survey would be. When they found out, they were naturally upset. They went to court, charging that their right to privacy had been violated and that their ability to control the information that was given to their children about sex was infringed. (I’m paraphrasing slightly. For more accurate legal jargon, see the link.) The court sided with the school, saying that parents do not have an exclusive right to determine the information that was given to their children.
Technically, I think maybe the court was right. If you send a child to school you’re basically saying you can’t tell your child everything. However, if the parents had complained because information on a specific religion had been passed out, the court would have sided with the parents, probably. The same goes for a political position. So I don’t think the courts would be consistent with this line of thought.
So what can the parents do now? While they have no recourse in the courts, they do have recourse in the polling place. Since they haven’t gotten an abject apology, a reasonable explanation for how this happened, and a list of steps taken to prevent this sort of thing in the future, they should recall the entire school board, demand that the “volunteer” be banned from all schools in the district, and have a large black mark put on the prinicipal’s performance review, provided they can’t justify firing the individual.
And if there’s a way to recall the judges, they should start working on that, too.
I do think the parents made a mistake in going the “right to privacy” route in their arguments. They should have gone the “sexual harassment” route. I don’t know what the laws are like in California, but in Colorado asking those kinds of questions would constitute sexual harassment. I know I would feel harassed if I was asked those questions. And I’d go for the stiffest type of sexual harassment charge I could get, one that would turn up on this “volunteer’s” record every time a background check is run so that he or she could never work with children again. The administration and the school board should be charged, too.
And if you can’t charge sexual harassment, get a web site, put the volunteer’s name and bio up with a copy of the survey, links to newspaper articles, the court’s decisions and the simple question, “Do you think this person exercised good judgment and acted appropriately?”
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