Parents in SAU4 serving the communities of Alexandria, Bridgewater, Bristol, Danbury, Groton, Hebron, Hill, and New Hampton, spoke passionately against the CDC wellness policy proposed for their school district at a recent school board meeting.
After discovering the proposed changes to their Wellness Policy, parents rejected accepting the CDC model policy that would turn their school district into a mental health and medical clinic.
This is the current Wellness Policy:
JLCF Healthy School Wellness SueThis is the proposed change to the CDC model policy:
NASD Wellness Policy 2023 (final draft)
We’ve already noted big problems within the schools that have implemented some of these changes. For instance, school districts that implemented the Multi-Tiered System of Support with Social and Emotional Learning are sharing personally identifiable mental health information on their students with Keene State- BHII. Parents and students had no idea that personal mental health information would be shared with anyone. Not only is this unethical, it violates the student’s privacy rights based on The New Hampshire Constitution.
This year, two young New Hampshire students were vaccinated against their parent’s consent. That’s what happens when you bring a vaccine clinic into the school when parents are not present. Parents in Rochester and Nashua found out their children were vaccinated after they sent strict notification not to vaccinate their child this year. Mistakes are going to happen when parents are not present.
Recently, in Maine, a father was shocked when he found a small bag of pills that were given to his daughter at the school based medical clinic. The parents of the 17-year-old were not aware that their child was prescribed Zoloft, a medication that causes suicidal thoughts. He then began questioning how this could happen without his knowledge or consent. It happened because the school district agreed to incorporate the CDC model by including a medical clinic at the school.
How did they treat and prescribe a medication without his knowledge or consent? The clinic says they don’t need parental consent because the Federal Government funds them. The CDC model is void of ethics or any respect for parental rights.
After the father in Maine discovered his daughter was put in danger, he withdrew her from the district. It gets worse–he was then visited by Child Protective Services who finally determined there was no problem with the parents. From the outside, it sure looks like he was retaliated against by someone either in the school or working at the school clinic.
Parents in SAU4 are now educating their board members that they don’t want any part of this. They value their God-given rights to parent their children. But school board members are too quick to chase federal dollars without any critical analysis of what it means for the families they are supposed to serve. People who run for school board need to do their due diligence on everything that comes before them.
Parents and residents made the case that they want the district to focus on academics.
No one mentioned the lack of education and credentials by those assessing and treating the students for their mental health. Many of the people working in the district do not have the education or credentials to treat a child’s anxiety, depression, or suicidal thoughts. These are extremely serious mental health problems that deserve expert care from a Ph.D. Child Psychologist who is licensed and follows the APA Code of Ethics. Parents would then get the best mental health care for their children, be included in the decisions with the doctor, and their child’s privacy would be protected. That’s not what parents will get with the CDC model.
After the parents and residents spoke, a student representative serving on the board went in the opposite direction, and supported all of these changes to the school system. Citing the importance of a child’s mental health, the child argued that turning the district into the CDC model would be good for children. But this is a child who has no idea how children have been physically harmed, and how students have had their privacy rights violated. I’m going to guess she has no idea where any of the sensitive personal mental health data on her peers has been sent.
Maybe this student and all of the board members should be aware of an incident that played out in East Stroudsburg Pennsylvania years ago when the 6th grade girls were rounded up in school, and then forced to undergo vaginal exams. Parents in PA were not notified, nor did they consent to forced genital exams on their 6th grade daughters. I wonder if the student representative serving on the SAU4 board would be so open to school based clinics if she knew the trauma that the girls in PA had to endure. This is what happens when parents are discarded by those who think they know better:
Parents were outraged that the exams had been performed, allegedly without their knowledge.
“It was horrible,” one of the girls testified Tuesday. “It hurt physically. But it really mentally hurt knowing that somebody was doing this to me when I didn’t want them to do it.”
The girl, now 15 and the trial’s first witness, wiped away tears as she described the exam. During her testimony, the physician, Ramlah Vahanvaty, was sitting 30 feet away at a defense table.
In the back of the courtroom, the girl’s father and other parents dabbed at their eyes with tissues. Her mother, who is seriously ill, was not in the courtroom.
The genital exams were performed during the overall medical checkups required by the state for sixth- graders.
No one in the audience at the school board meeting disputes the importance of good medical and mental health care for children but that’s not the mission of public education. The district is struggling to meet its own mission of providing a quality academic education. How does anyone think they will be able to meet the child’s medical and mental health needs? They are already proving they are incapable of taking on these tasks because they are not hiring the best qualified individuals, following ethical guidelines, or providing the privacy protections students deserve.
The school board should reject the revised wellness policy, and the wellness committee shut down. There is enough evidence to show that school districts are not the place to provide these services.
