Parent Rights, Choices & Responsibilities
and Student Data Protection
If you take a look through Arizona’s state K-12 standards for health education, you will see that the vast majority of these standards (especially for elementary school students) are both non-controversial and very helpful for students to learn, in order to improve their success in life.
If only our students had been learning practical effective physical & mental health habits, instead of worsening:
- from almost no child obesity and very rare teen prediabetes and low levels of depression, four to five decades ago…
- to such widespread serious problems today—including 1 in 3 teens with prediabetes, and over 40% of teens with significant mental health challenges—across incomes & ethnicities.
There are very few parents who do not want their children to know how to:
- Eat & drink nutritiously
- Be physically active
…and as they get older also:
- Handle stress
- Not smoke
- Not use illegal drugs or abuse alcohol
- Avoid violence including being safe at school and in the community
- Deal with a bully
- Dealing in a balanced way with social media
Parental Consent: Opt-out Opt-in
However, if a parent finds certain health-related topics to be too controversial, the parent should be able to opt their student out of those class segments at their school.
(In addition, principals or school boards may in some cases decide that certain topics are “too hot to handle”—at all.)
Hopefully, the parent who opts out would still educate the child at home on any significant health topic, which their child does not learn about at school because the parent excluded the child from that topic. This is especially important, since harmful student health trends are so common and varied nowadays…and keep worsening as students get older.
(The school could also offer an alternative learning module, which a parent considers non-controversial and could choose to opt-in-to—to replace the part of K-12 health education that the parent finds objectionable.)
Additional Parental Options
However, if a parent finds certain health-related topics to be too controversial, the parent should be able to opt their student out of those class segments at their school.
Many parents in Arizona (and an increasing number of other states) have a broad range of publicly-funded school choices: a huge variety of district schools, charter schools, Christian and secular private schools—and even publicly funded home schooling.
In some cases, public funds can even be split as needed to fund different educational needs, and used for different learning experiences. This is already being done in some states including Arizona.
This approach could be helpful, for example, to schools without extensive athletic facilities, and small schools which cannot afford a dedicated physical or health education teacher, to pay other schools to provide those services. Schools could partner with parents to share Healthy Students Healthy State funds with other schools or community partners that can provide those resources.)
Parental Components and Health Education
It is widely recognized in health education of children, that the most effective programs should ideally include parents as part of the education process.
For younger children, who are not making big health or other life decisions on their own, these “parental components” recognize parents’ control of almost all aspects of their kids’ lives. For example, you can teach children healthy nutrition practices at school—but if parents aren’t on board, kids may still eat less healthy food at home. Parents want to improve their children’s health, and may appreciate help from schools to do so.
So K-12 nutrition and other health-related education should include parents and families as part of the educational process, with intentionality, in order to maximize effectiveness and help spread learning to the entire family. Of course, it is up to parents, to what extent they participate in this. As children age into adolescence, they start to become more independent. However, even though teens may think they know it all—their parents still need to be involved in guiding their adolescents’ lives. So optional parental educational components can also play an important role in the teen years.
Preparing Kids for a Healthy Life
But health trends among our children and adolescents are too dangerous to not deal with them.
We cannot afford to simply ignore preventive education K-12—as we have, to a large extent, for decades. Or to focus narrowly on and argue incessantly about the most controversial issues—when there are so many non-controversial health-related topics which need to be addressed.
Schools should be required to provide reasonable opt-out and opt-in alternatives for parents in health education. But neither parents nor schools should “throw out the baby (student) with the bath water (controversy in a small number of areas)”—by never dealing with health issues.
For many of our children’s futures: this is ultimately, literally, a matter of life or death.
More Info: Student Data Protection
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