by Sayer Ji, Green Med Info:
‘The scope of services is well beyond what you would find with school nurse services. It goes into reproductive counseling, dental care, mental health counseling, behavioral services. And this replaces what your child would typically receive from a primary care provider with parental engagement,’ Stand for Health Freedom’s Leah Wilson said.
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As a new academic year begins, a medical freedom group is warning parents about the reality of school-based health centers (SBHC) that operate to advise and provide students’ medical care without the crucial involvement of their parents.
Stand for Health Freedom (SHF) is a nonprofit organization “dedicated to informing and activating a grassroots movement to protect ourselves and protect our families.” Though its mission spans a number of issues related to informed consent, parental rights and freedom of religion, speech and privacy, SHF sees a growing issue within SBHC that threatens the rights of parents to make informed health decisions for their children.
“One thing that parents need to understand is they are there to offer primary health care services,” SHF executive director and co-founder Leah Wilson told LifeSiteNews in a phone interview. “And we have even seen in the literature and pediatric journal in 2014, way back then, they were already calling [these] school-based health centers ‘medical homes.'”
“The scope of services is well beyond what you would find with school nurse services. It goes into reproductive counseling, dental care, mental health counseling, behavioral services. And this replaces what your child would typically receive from a primary care provider with parental engagement.”
Wilson said that the centers use “pre-consent” to operate without parental involvement, “which is simply a one-page consent form being sent home at the beginning of the year. And there’s language such as this that gives consent for your child to see any and all health care providers in this health center.” The pre-consent opens the door for “very dynamic encounters” that may take place “without further parental knowledge or notification being required.”
Although the centers have been around since the 1970s, when they formed to provide medical care in rural and inner-city America, they have exploded with growth in recent years as government funding began to fuel the programs. For Wilson’s family, the issue became prevalent when the governor of her home state of Indiana prioritized SBHC as part of a “public health commission.”
In June 2022, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) was signed into law. Wilson pointed out that the legislative language includes “50-plus references to school-based health but only one reference to parental consent, and that reference isn’t even related to school-based health centers.”
The BSCA language, combined with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) offering grants specifically to establish SBHC, led Wilson’s family to “see this as part of a larger agenda to undermine parental rights.”
The HHS provided “nearly $25 million to improve and strengthen access to school-based health services in communities across the country,” according to a May 3, 2022, press release from the federal agency. The funds were distributed to 125 health programs offering “comprehensive” medical services.
“It’s bad policy,” Wilson said. “And it’s shortsighted to think that schools can replace parental involvement in health care. When you talk to most parents, they would tell you there’s a reason they don’t just drop their child off at the front door of the doctor’s office and leave and come back later. Even medical ethics don’t allow that.”
“As parents, how do we feel about our role being replaced in this sensitive position of authority? Because once a child leaves at age 18 and they no longer have a school-based health center guiding them through health, where does that leave them? Are they learning a habit of compliance rather than engagement, rather than responsibility for their own health?”
To combat the issue, SHF seeks to not only educate parents about the reality of SBHC but also inform and urge legislators to protect child innocence and parental rights. The group has state directors in 30 states who have been directly involved in challenging laws in Indiana, Maryland and Nevada.
