Parental Involvement:
Using the Hatch Amendment to Protect Your Child
Q. I
don't like to see all the psychological tampering the schools are trying to do
with children these days. It's as if they are practicing psychiatry without a
license. They seem to be probing for child abuse and neglect when it isn't
there, and defining what is mental health when they themselves exhibit many
behaviors that most people would consider unhealthy. The pot, calling the
kettle black! Mothers and fathers are ALWAYS wrong in the schools' eyes, while
in the eyes of us parents, it's usually the SCHOOL in the wrong, on some of
these controversial psychological issues. What can I do to make sure my child
is protected from school messing with her mind?
One of the best ways to stand up for
your child, and protect your family's sovereignty and right to privacy, is to
take advantage of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment - commonly called
"The Hatch Amendment."
If anything in school is fully or partially paid for
with federal funds, and you have this letter on file, and the curriculum, or
survey, or whatever, would invade your child's privacy under this law, then they
are not supposed to subject your child to it.
Here's what the law protects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Pupil_Rights_Amendment
As the schools have gradually gotten more and more
entangled with social engineering and behavior modification techniques, to the
point where some critics say schools are closer to "therapy centers" than
schools, the students are treated more and more like mental health patients,
and less and less like students.
Some of the surveys are disturbing - implying that
only nerds aren't having sex and using drugs and alcohol by high school, or
asking kids if they've ever had suicidal feelings - and since your child's
responses can be see by who knows who, through the international data
trafficking system set up by the federal education bureaucracy, you really
don't want your child subjected to these kinds of questions.
The Hatch Amendment was prophetic in setting up a way
to protect children, though educators rarely inform parents that this
protection device is available.
It was introduced by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and passed
in the U.S. Congress as part of the Education Amendments of 1978. Here's what
he said:
". . . The techniques used to change young children's
attitudes and values are an invasion of privacy in the first degree, especially
in some of the innovative testing questions soliciting young children to
pinpoint their father's or mother's faults, or in another ESEA-sponsored
program which actually had the students of an elementary school class
collectively put their parents on trial - following which the mother and father
were always found guilty. . . . Again, what I am concerned with, as are my
colleagues who have co-sponsored the parental consent amendment, is not the
monitoring of basic education, but of the behavior-probing tests, games, and
surveys currently being conducted. . . ."
-- Sen. Orrin Hatch,
testimony before Congress, Aug. 23, 1978
The only shortcoming appears to be a lack of an
enforcement mechanism attached to the law. So if the school violates the spirit
of the letter you have on file, there may not be a way to punish it through the
courts or in other ways . . . though publicizing what happened to your
community's electorate and taxpayers is always a good way to prevent a
recurrence.
Homework: Here's a sample Hatch Amendment form you could have on file
with your child's school:
http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/Education/hatch_amendment.htm
Here's another link that
contains a sample Hatch Amendment letter to put on file with your child's
school, followed by some good patriotic documents that it might be nice to have
on hand to teach your child about his or her civil liberties, including the
right to privacy:
http://www.christianpatriot.com/hatch.htm