Kid Issues

A new alert for parents of teens. After reading and signing so many consent forms over the years, you may be surprised to find out that you’re not being asked to sign one form.

Teen Screen, a survey purported to identify suicidal tendencies among teens, uses free movie coupons to entice 9 year olds to undergo screening and relies on something called a passive consent form to assume that the testing is okay with you. If you DON’T sign the form, it is assumed that you have given your permission.

The ethics of the test has been questioned by reputable doctors, including PsychSearch.net a consumer watchdog. PsychSearch calls the test “A Front Group for the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex”. According to them:

"TeenScreen is a very controversial so-called 'diagnostic psychiatric service' aka suicide survey; done on children who are then referred to psychiatric treatment. The evidence suggests that the objective of the psychiatrists who designed TeenScreen is to place children so selected on psychotropic drugs."

Information gathered in this test has never been proven to indicate suicidal tendencies (i.e. we don’t even know that the test works) and can be very damaging to your child in both the short and long term if a significant psychological problem is identified and put in a school record.

One more thing to talk to your school about on your annual visit…

In the past few years, schools have been taken to task for their reliance on Social Security numbers as a means of identifying students. Schools have responded slowly and students, by and large, give up information when asked.

That’s why, when asked to sign in with a name and Social Security number for an anatomy class, Polk Community College students did what students around the country generally do. They complied. In this case, however, the danger of information abuse wasn’t exposure of the number to faceless thieves but to the class’s teacher – who has just been charged with stealing the identities of at least three of his students.

When interviewed by the Associated Press, one student said “We figured, ‘He’s a teacher, what is he going to do with the Social Security number?'"

What indeed.

Jim McDermott and Pete Stark, both military veterans and Congressmen, are joining forces with a Pittsburgh political punk band, Anti-Flag, to publicize a petition drive to change a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act. While protecting the dissemination of certain information, the Act is notable for making student records available to the military so that they can engage in targeted recruiting campaigns. As Justin Sane, Anti-Flag’s lead singer, puts it, “How can anyone wonder why young people mistrust so many adults when a law gets passed that invades young people’s privacy without even their knowledge or consent.”

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, parents can opt out of this information sharing, but the campaign is worthwhile in that other invasions into student records being proposed or undertaken by government are not voluntary.

To sign the petition, for an opt-out form or for more information, go to www.militaryfreezone.org.

For those parents concerned about what their kids do online, there is another thing to think about.

The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a report on technology use in public schools. Given that 95% of schools now offer Internet access, even if you don’t have a computer in your house, you should be talking to your child about their activities online.

What’s more, although 100% of schools have some form of technology or process in place to keep your kids away from harmful content, eMarketer notes that a software company released a study 8 months ago which showed that roughly 2/3 of school tech decision makers said students at their school had been exposed to inappropriate content.

Questions to ask your kids include what sites they visit? Do they chat online or use a webcam? Have they made friends online? Do they know how to find and read a site’s privacy policy? And most important, Do they know what to do if they see something or receive an email/im/chat that makes them uncomfortable?

Two recent reports highlight increased government efforts to track students.

The first is a proposal from the Department of Education to track enrollment of every college student in the United States. Currently, colleges must report on aggregate numbers but this new plan tracks every individual individually. DOE says this degree of tracking is needed because aggregate numbers mask some issues – like how many kids drop out of one school only to enroll in another or what each one really pays for their education after financial aid. College administrators have expressed concern that these records are going to maintained indefinitely by government and could be accessed by other agencies. Although the DOE says it won’t share data, one could easily imagine a ‘national security’ exemption for this data just as there is for other government held information.

The second report, courtesy of the ever-vigilant Electronic Privacy Information Center, is about a new system to match Selective Service registration with information held by the Department of Education. Specifically, anyone receiving a federal loan would be automatically checked to make sure they had registered for the draft. Problems noted by EPIC as well as the Privacy Journal, Consumer Action, Privacy Rights Now Coalition, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, American Association of University Professors, and the World Privacy Forum, include the lack of identification of just what data is going to be matched and the lack of verification procedures. Both of these could contribute to errors which could conceivably stop or interfere with someone going to school. Another problem, similar to the one raised by college administrators concerning the other DOE data collection initiative, is that there is no provision for record destruction.

Now, is it just me, or is the DOE saying they want more student data on the one hand and saying they are going to share data with the Selective Service on the other hand just a coincidence?

Warning for new parents: identity thieves have a new scam and you’re the target. An identity thief posing as a health worker conned at least one Salt Lake City mom into giving up personal information supposedly in order to process insurance on the new baby. The thief used the mom’s Social Security number to get a credit card and go on a $40,000 spending spree that included an SUV. Before giving out your information that identifies you to anyone, make sure you check their id first…

Some parents may take comfort in knowing that there is a law that governs how websites can collect information on their children. This, then, is a word of caution to those parents. The FTC has just decided that Amazon’s Toy Store section of its website is directed at adults not at children and therefore is not subject to the protections afforded by the Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Some advocacy groups, including EPIC, sent a letter to the FTC complaining that by using child models and including content directed at children, Amazon had extended the appeal of its site. Indeed, there have been cases where children have registered.

Based on Amazon’s privacy policy – in which they state that the site is meant for adults - the FTC made their decision. The lesson for parents is that just because you think a site is targeted at your kids, the company creating it and the government agencies regulating it may not think so. As the posts in this section have repeatedly suggested, when it comes to parenting kids who go online, you can’t be involved enough in what they do!

As discussed in the kid's chapter of the Identity Theft Protection Guide, the 2001 law that mandated school testing, No Child Left Behind, also included a rather tangential provision to make student data available to the military for recruitment purposes.

What I didn't mention was that, as with sharing of "directory information" governed by the other big school law, FERPA, parents can opt out of having this information released if they choose.

Make sure you add that to the list of questions to ask your child's school each September...