by Karin Piper
Florida mom Lee Kersey had questions about her daughter’s participation in the State’s Voluntary Pre Kindergarten Program (VPK). When looking for answers, she stumbled upon a shocking find: The Florida Legislature had amended the state statute making participating children exempt from certain constitutional rights. By enrolling her child in VPK she would allow the government to harvest and share private information such as “assessment data, health data, records of teacher observations, and other personally identifiable information of an enrolled child and his or her parent.” Teachers’ observations about parental behavior, gleaned second hand from children, become part of the infamous permanent record, with no chance of parental review or redaction. “I am furious,” says Kersey about her findings. “It seems like every day brings a new challenge from the government for my parental rights. How dare politicians think that they can trample all over my daughter and I to revoke her fourth amendment rights? No one should have the right to know her personal information without my express written consent.” And she isn’t alone. Kersey’s find has sparked national effort among parents who are seeking to find out how it is possible for the government to access and freely share such information without parental consent. Family Education Rights to Privacy Act (FERPA) and state laws are changing across the nation to allow the government the right to collect private, personally identifiable information on your children without parental consent or notification. These changes are being made to accommodate Obamacare as well as Common Core Standards, two federal programs that will serve as a conduit for thorough and comprehensive data collection on children and their families. Forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have adopted the Common Core State Standards. Parents have already found that state legislature have amended privacy statues for preschoolers in Oregon and Nevada.And in the State of Colorado, the state legislature just passed a law creating a commission that will make annual recommendations for additional legislation on tracking your children from birth through age five- in “the best interest of the state.” The information this commission will be considering for collection includes your children’s school readiness, health care, mental health, parental involvement, family support, childcare, and early learning. In the good ole days we used to allow parents to collect that data in “scrapbooks.” But those were also the distant days when only convicted felons lost a portion of their constitutional rights. Now, with the implementation of both Obamacare and Common Core Standards, data mining will begin in the womb, recognizing the government’s rights to revoke part of your child’s constitutional natural rights before your baby is legally considered as a human being by the same federal government. That shouldn’t surprise however since they’ve been denying the right to life to kids since inception. So one must wonder, is preschool attendance or being born a felony deserving revocation of constitutional rights? If not, how are state legislators exalted to the duty of revoking natural rights of our children?
