Back-to-school time brought a slew of forms for parents to sign.
This year, though, some Tennessee parents may have seen something new: a form asking for their consent for school officials to provide medical care to their children.
Schools should have been doing this all along. But many weren’t, meaning they were making medical decisions and even medical referrals for a child without parental involvement.Fortunately, the General Assembly passed and the governor signed the Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act , which ensures parents — not government officials — are guiding a child’s health care. In doing so, the legislature prioritized the well-being of children by empowering their fiercest advocates — parents.
The new law simply requires all government officials — including school employees — to recognize and respect parents’ right to “direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of the child.”Both the Tennessee Supreme Court and federal appellate courts have consistently upheld parents’ “fundamental liberty interest in the care and custody of their children,” but state law had fallen behind. Specifically, Tennessee allowed adolescents to consent to their own medical care without the knowledge or consent of their parents.Children belong to their parents — not to teachers, doctors, school nurses, or therapists. Parents know and love their children best, and children deserve to have their parents’ guidance as they navigate the ups and downs of adolescence.
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Increasingly, government officials have more access to and exert greater influence over children—while parents are pushed out of the picture. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in public schools. Over the last five years, Tennessee schools have become centralized hubs that direct the education, upbringing, and even mental and physical health care of children through a system called “ Coordinated School Health .”
Your local school doesn’t just employ teachers and school counselors anymore. Their taxpayer-funded staff list has ballooned to include physicians, clinical social workers, nurses, dentists, dental hygienists, and nutritionists. Students are taught that this government-run, one-stop shop can meet all of their needs — including referring students to off-campus clinics for more intensive medical services.
Last summer, the Tennessee Department of Education laid out its centralized plan in its " Guidelines for Healthcare in a School Setting ." This document describes how the TDOE “connects physical, emotional, and social health with education” through both school-based and off-site health clinics.
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The schools push “comprehensive preventive and primary healthcare services” on students without parental involvement. Even worse, the school “connects the student with providers within the community to deliver healthcare services” using “telehealth, telemedicine, and mobile clinics.” To be sure, this document was not written to tell nurses how to apply Band-aids or ice packs .
Parents, not government officials, should be making decisions for children
It’s not just traditional health care, either. In 2021, the adults that run Metro Nashville Public Schools implemented “ Gender Support Plans ” that undermined a parent’s rights by covertly gathering sensitive information from a child and making that information inaccessible to parents based on the child’s responses to a questionnaire. MNPS justified this policy by pointing to Tennessee’s lax laws governing parental consent for minors’ medical and mental health care.
The common theme is that government officials were making critical decisions for children that could have harmful, lifelong consequences, and the parents of those children could legally be left in the dark. It does not take a Supreme Court scholar to understand that these government programs were taking advantage of huge gaps in Tennessee law to strip away a parent’s fundamental right to make medical and mental health decisions for his or her children.
The Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act solved this problem by properly prioritizing the legal rights and responsibilities of parents, children, and providers. As a result, school officials are requesting parental permission like they should have been doing all along. So check the box to provide consent — or don’t. It’s your right and your responsibility to make that decision. Thanks to this new law, no one can take that from you.
Jordan Carpenter is legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom ( @ADFLegal ) and its Center for Public Policy. He is a licensed Tennessee attorney from Shelby County who testified in House and Senate committees several times on the Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: New Tennessee law strengthens parental rights in school. That's a good thing
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