It is bad enough that parents no longer have democrats fighting for them, but we are now seeing some of our elected Republicans follow in that direction.
Today the NH House of Representatives and Senators had to concur on an important parental rights Bill. HB1639
You can watch the Committee of Conference meeting here. Fast forward to 1:02:00
When the NH House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill, that legislation goes to a Committee of Conference where both sides must concur on an acceptable version. In this case, you will see that Jay Kahn (D) leads Senators Ruth Ward (R) and Erin Hennessey (R) to oppose a good bill that would have required parental consent when children take a CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey at school.
We know anytime there is research conducted on children, ethical guidelines require informed consent from parents. Children can be exploited which is what we’ve been seeing for many years that this survey has been administered.
You can read from Dr. Mark B. Constantian who explains the ethical reasoning for parental consent on surveys like the YRBS. He says:
There is an easy example of why this legislation is needed.
I have done many years of clinical research. Any research involving students, according to the Declaration of Helsinki, requires Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. The purpose of such approval, which is rigorous, is to assure that any human experimentation, which includes surveys, is not only safe but likely to produce important new information.
The current Youth Risk Behavior Survey would not pass IRB muster, for several reasons.
First, to my knowledge it is not a metric proven to give reliable information. It is not “controlled,” except by measuring the current data against the data from two years ago. To my knowledge, the YRBS has not been shown to be reliable; and moreover its questions are potentially harmful because they can create confusion in the children’s minds, plant ideas that may not have occurred to them, and invade their privacy in a way that parents may not approve. The YBRS is thus an experiment with no defined goal.
The latest administrative analysis of this data (attached) is naïve. The writer consistently talks about “significant” change with no evidence of any statistical proof, and is excited, for example, that the percent of students who ingest alcohol before sexual intercourse has dropped from 22% to 5% in two years. This is an unbelievable conclusion.
Sadly, none of this mattered to the Senators. What matters is that NGO’s receive funding $$$ from grant organizations so they can offer programs to schools to curb risky behavior. Does it work? Who knows. No one presented any independent research to the committee during the hearings, that showed their programs curb risky behavior. In fact, I’d argue that some of these programs do the opposite. But I guess that doesn’t matter. Facts be damned, let’s throw money at the problems and hope they work. But what if they don’t work and actually do the opposite? Read more about that here.
These people make their living off of selling these programs to schools. They should be held to a very high standard. They should be conducting their research in an ethical way, and they should present independent and peer-reviewed studies showing their programs actually work.
For now, parents lose. The CDC survey will continue in our schools without any ethical boundaries. While parents may have seen momentum on their side, some of their elected officials just threw them under the bus.
It is good to mention that the four State Representative serving on this committee supported the opt-in requirement on the YRBS. They should be thanked for not abandoning parental rights:
Rick Ladd (R)
Deb Hobson (R)
Glenn Cordelli (R)
Ralph Boehm (R)
On parental rights :
CDC 1
Parents 0
