Action Alert: Ask Your State Senator to Oppose SB459 Today!

Families and kids need your help in stopping this bad bill, and your opposition to it must be made known by Wednesday night, 04/03/2024, at the latest.

SB459  bill adds emotional and psychological harm as benchmarks for the presumption of harm to a child. While we acknowledge that psychological abuse is real, it is not something that can be measured. Only objective, measurable, quantifiable metrics should be used as a reason to terminate parental rights. We fear the consequences of this bill will be that parents will end up bringing in their experts to oppose the state’s experts with opposing opinions, leaving children stuck in the middle because of the subjective nature of the metrics.

This Republican-sponsored bill has some explaining to do. If this bill were to substitute parents, guardians, or caretakers for PUBLIC SCHOOLS, I would agree with it. With public schools using social-emotional learning (SEL) to identify which students are in tier 1, 2 or 3 of mental health intervention, also known as the Multi-Tier System of Support for Behavioral Health and Wellness (MTSS-B, the mental health piece of the SEL pie) this would give DCYF superpowers to intervene and possibly take kids from families. This could increase DCYF’s caseload by 10 to 20 percent, and DCYF/DHHS plans on hiring 35 new people, costing the state about 4 million a year (see fiscal note section on the bill).

The intention for creating this bill may be right, but it’s a horrible bill by adding emotional, social, and even psychological health into the bill. It uses vague, non-concrete words like recklessly, attention, emotional, or psychological well-being. Emotional, social, and psychological are unable to be 100% reproducible where each person tested would produce exactly the same results. Each person is different (you like hunting Bambi to put food on your table, and I think it’s emotionally traumatic to kill an animal, or you like allowing abortions up to 6 months, and I am traumatized that anyone could let this happen).

We want to thank Rep John Sellers for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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Look at sections 6 and 7 closely… Shoot, look at this whole bill very closely; there are just too many things I see as wrong and subjective. It just gives DCYF more power and leaves the parents, guardians, and caretakers helpless.