A provision in NC’s ‘Parents’ Rights’ bill could torpedo school funding for mental health | Opinion

On Tuesday night, senators in the North Carolina General Assembly voted to send the Parents’ Bill of Rights to the House of Representatives. The state’s iteration of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill puts trans students in harm’s way by outing them to caregivers if they start using a different name or different pronouns while at school. But it creates risk for all students who may need some extra care.

One of the 2023 additions to the bill was a provision that would require parents to opt in to any surveys on student behaviors deemed “protected information,” from the religion of the student’s family to the student’s drinking and drug use. If made law, parents would be notified of a survey ten days prior to its administration, and given the text of what the survey asks.

This decision directly impacts the federal Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a nationwide questionnaire designed to keep track of the actions of high school students and how those students can be better-resourced — and therefore, better-supported. According to the Center for Disease Control, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) provides a model for tracking progress and making goals. In some cases, having this data gives school administrators a tool to seek additional funding to address a persistent problem in their school.

Currently, only 49 of North Carolina’s 135 school districts are in the survey. A spokesperson for the Department of Public Instruction did not respond to a request for more information on the reasons these school districts declined to participate in the survey. The current survey asks about sexual orientation, but not gender identity.

While the YRBS is already voluntary, asking all parents to opt into the survey is an extra step that could prevent accurate data on issues that concern more than just trans kids. Having parents opt out of the survey by default will affect data collection on risky behaviors like drinking and sexual activity, as well as suicidal ideation and self-harm. It would even affect our understanding of how many children in North Carolina have been bullied in school or online.

If the state does not have accurate data on these topics, it will be difficult for any schools to receive adequate funding to deal with these issues. And the stressors high school students experience will still exist, even if no data is gathered on them.

“We already fight — not just LGBTQ folks, but people of color and women — to be counted in particular ways in data, and we know that all policy and funding is data-driven,” says Kendra Johnson, Executive Director of Equality NC. “If we take away the information that our bodies like the CDC have that would help us address issues as they’re emerging, this is another way of underfunding schools.”

A similar issue sprung from Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in 2022. The statute includes a provision that requires school districts to “provide parents certain questionnaires or health screening forms and obtain parental permission before administering such questionnaires and forms. A months later, the state withdrew from the national YRBS survey.

Like Florida’s law, North Carolina’s bill is dehumanizing to trans people and puts trans kids in harm’s way if their parents are not affirming of their identities. It condemns discussion of “sexuality” before the fourth grade— even though no one is discussing sexuality with children — and children are shown examples of the nuclear family all the time in schools. But the potential to lose out on data that could impact lives is terrifying. The state received $17 million in federal funding for 15 districts that needed extra mental health support for their students. What will that funding look like if we have even fewer students answering the survey that provided the foundation for that funding?

Gov. Roy Cooper says he believes this bill could “potentially” impact the state the way HB 2 did. It’s going to do more than that — it’s going to harm schools’ abilities to care for their students, and that could have new and dangerous consequences.