Courts hit parents with triple whammy
By Phyllis Schlafly
From Townhall.com
Dec 19, 2005
Federal judges have just hit parents with a triple whammy. Two appellate courts held that parents have no right to stop offensive, privacy-invading interrogation of their own children in public schools. In a third case, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that it is not going to do anything to protect parental rights concerning schools.
It has become clear that many courts have adopted the notion that a village - in these cases, schools - should raise children. Judges prefer to side with schools and against parents.
When a New Jersey mother was horrified to learn that her daughter and classmates had been asked how many times they had tried to kill themselves, she filed suit to protect the rights of parents and pupils. She won on the first appeal to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in C.N. v. Ridgewood Board of Education, but the school was relentless in litigation to assert its primary authority and the court finally ruled in favor of the school.
At issue was a 156-question survey called "Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes and Behaviors," which probed students about their personal lives and activities. The survey included questions about sex, drugs, suicide, incriminating behavior, spirituality, tolerance and other personal matters.
Questions 92-93 in this survey given to Ridgewood children asked "how many times" they "had used cocaine" in their lives, or during the last 12 months, and the answer choices were 0, 1, 2, 3-5, 6-9, 10-19, 20-39, and 40+. This gave students the false impression that casual use of cocaine is common and acceptable.
Misleading questions can have a powerful effect. Our legal system recognizes this by providing dozens of reasons for lawyers to object to questions in court in order to protect their witnesses from having to answer improper questions.
Children lack the maturity to tell the difference between questions they should or should not answer. Children are trained in school that they must answer questions or face discipline or a poor grade.
Ask an adult when he stopped beating his wife and expect to be told to get lost. Ask a child in the classroom how often he takes drugs or has sex, and the child will think he ought to answer.
But judges who routinely uphold lawyers' objections to improper questions in court think it is OK to ask offensive questions of children in school. In the Ridgewood decision, the court agreed with the parents that the students' participation in the survey might have been mandatory, and conceded that the leading questions could be suggestive to students, but nevertheless ruled that parents' and pupils' rights were not violated.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went further, marking the school door as the line where parents' rights end and the "village" takes over. In Fields v. Palmdale School District in November, the judges ruled that the right of parents "does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door."
Just last term, the U.S. Supreme Court devoted time and energy to a silly lawsuit over the replacement of a male teacher as coach of a girls basketball team. When a teacher has a complaint, the Supreme Court springs to attention; but when a parent has a complaint about indoctrination of his or her child, the high court doesn't even want to hear about it.
In the same 30 days as the Ridgewood and Palmdale cases, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review another parental rights case in Crowley v. McKinney. The high court is spending its time this term on a slew of cases about prisoners' rights (even about the alleged right of prisoners to read pornographic magazines) rather than hear a single case about parents' rights to raise their children.
In Crowley v. McKinney, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the parent, saying that the school has a constitutional right of "the autonomy of educational institutions." The parent had appealed to the Supreme Court to recognize the "settled law" of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which in 1925 recognized the constitutional right of parents to control the education of their own children.
Even though recognizing the Supreme Court's holding in Pierce that "Oregon's project of forcing all children to attend public schools implied a hostility to private education that had no footing in American traditions or educational policy," the 7th Circuit ignored its application to the current case. Does forcing children to answer questions about sex, drugs and suicide have a "footing in American traditions"? Of course not.
It hasn't grabbed the attention of the Supreme Court that the 3rd, 7th and 9th circuit courts have ignored the settled law of Pierce. You can bet the high court would take a case that requires testing schoolchildren for use of illegal drugs, yet the Supreme Court refuses to face the issue of requiring schoolchildren to participate in classroom surveys that suggests doing drugs is normal behavior.
Teachers are not required to answer these intrusive questions, so why are children? Evidently, parents are the only ones who do not benefit from equal protection of the law.
The original story that caught our eyes
From Boortz.com:
THE POWER OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
. . . this strange story out of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California. It seems some parents were not all that pleased with some sex education courses and materials that were being used in their own government schools. (Serves them right.) So ... they filed suit. They lost. The 9th Circuit wrote that "there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children.... Parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students."
Here is a news story that discusses the case:
While the surveys asked students how often they thought about sex, among other questions, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday that parents of public school children have no "fundamental right" to be the exclusive provider of sexual information to their children. The parents maintained they had the sole right "to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex."
The plaintiffs had sought unspecified monetary damages.
In upholding a lower court that had also ruled against the parents, a three-judge panel of the appeals court here dismissed the case, ruling unanimously that "parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on that subject to their students in any forum or manner they select."
Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for the San Francisco-based panel, added that "no such specific right can be found in the deep roots of the nation's history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty."
The appellate panel noted that other courts have upheld similar issues, including mandatory health classes, a school district's condom distribution program and a district's compulsory sex education program.
An attorney for the parents, Erik Gunderson, said he was exploring appellate options. The district's attorney, Dennis Walsh, said the survey was not to sexually exploit children but instead was part of a legitimate program to help students.
The district, located in Los Angeles County, had dropped the survey in 2002 amid complaints from parents. The poll was given to children in the first, third and fifth grades.
It was part of a program to gauge exposure to early trauma and to assist in designing a program for children to overcome barriers to learning, according to the district.
Parents whose students took the survey signed consent forms, however the forms never mentioned sex would be a topic. Questions the children answered included whether they thought about having sex, thought about touching other people's "private parts" and whether they could "stop thinking about having sex."
The case is Fields v. Palmdale School District, 03-56499.
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