Parent’s Bill Of Rights Act Introduced In Tennessee Legislature
Image Credit: capitol.tn.gov / public domain / CC
Representative Weaver and Senator Bowling have introduced the “Parent Bill of Rights Act” in the Tennessee General Assembly to codify the rights of Tennessee parents in an effort to better protect children from various forms of harm inflicted by Local Education Agencies.
Representative Terri Lynn Weaver (R-Lancaster-District 40) and Senator Janice Bowling (R-Tullahoma-District 16) filed their companion bills on February 1st, 2022.
House Bill 2451 (HB2451) and Senate Bill 2360 (SB2360) in summary, will require Local Education Agencies (LEAs) to permit parents to have access to certain information, including the names of instructors, titles available in the school library, teacher manuals, and curriculum.
The legislation will also require that LEAs acquire written consent before a student can participate in any extracurricular activity, family life lesson, field trip, school assembly, or guest speaker event.
The bill will prohibit certain healthcare practitioners from providing medical treatment to a minor without parental consent or an appropriate court order.
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In addition, the bill will require LEAs to:
• Allow parents or legal guardians to review the names of any organization or individual receiving funding from or contracting with the LEA in the school year.
• Allow parents to visit their student during regular school hours including allowing observation of the student’s classroom.
• Allow parents to review the content of curriculum, teacher manuals, and textbooks for any classroom of the parent’s or legal guardian’s student without being required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
• Allow parents to review a list of titles or materials that have been borrowed from the school library by their child.
The legislation will require LEAs to immediately notify parents if:
• There is any incident concerning student safety in the school, including any crimes committed by a teacher, substitute teacher, guest speaker, or other individual while providing instruction to the student.
• Medical treatment is provided to the student by the LEA.
If passed, the “Parent Bill of Rights Act” will amend Tennessee Code TCA Section 14-4-103; Title 49 and Title 63.
Also, if passed, the Act will take effect before Fall Semester 2022 (effective date of July 1, 2022) and will apply to private rights of action accruing on or after July 1st, 2021.
Weaver and Bowling’s bill lines up almost perfectly with a Parent’s Bill of Rights that was drafted by Tennessee mom, Kristin Benton, in November of 2021.
Benton shared her draft legislation with multitudes of Tennessee parents, asking them to share it with their legislators before the start of the General Session in January 2022.
It would appear that the efforts paid off.
About the Author: Jason Vaughn, Media Coordinator for The Tennessee Conservative ~ Jason previously worked for a legacy publishing company based in Crossville, TN in a variety of roles through his career. Most recently, he served as Deputy Directory for their flagship publication. Prior, he was a freelance journalist writing articles that appeared in the Herald Citizen, the Crossville Chronicle and The Oracle among others. He graduated from Tennessee Technological University with a Bachelor’s in English-Journalism, with minors in Broadcast Journalism and History. Contact Jason at news@TennesseeConservativeNews.com
WOW!!! When did this all go wrong? My parents had all this access 50 years ago as I did with my child 25 years ago. Now there has to be new legislation to get these rights back. How sad that the school boards, teacher’s unions have been allowed to usurp the rights of parents. Thank you to all the legislators who support and pass this legislation.
This needs to pass now. Use too this was not much of a issue. Now Children are being taught liberal garbage and everything else but what they need.
It seems so strange that sixty years after I graduated, we have to codify the parents right in regard to education. My teachers and the staff encouraged parents to engage them in conversations over and above the ubiquitous parent/teacher meetings. Assembly’s were held where curriculum’s were explained and rarely, but occasionally, certain lessons were dropped. What a strange country this has become.
Is this strictly for parent’s rights when it comes to their children’s education? I am currently looking for something like the collective edition of every single Birth Parent’s Rights when it comes to dealing with DCS, and please, i don’t need judgement now, i need prayer. my husband and I and our family need prayers from as many people as we can get, to save our NICU baby that we never even got the chance to bring home, because of a 27 year veteran of the department allowed an intern, not even an employee with the department, to do work that she should have been doing, for her, so this thing that was nothing but a horrible mistake made by the hospital, has ended up costing us the first 8 months of my son’s life, true and quality medical care for him as he was premature, still hasn’t even been circumcised and never saw a doctor until my husband and I had gotten fed up and went to the state’s insurance company, inquiring about his claims ourselves. He was almost 7 months old before he ever saw a single doctor. We have worked their plans, even though allowing an intern to rip my family apart is illegal, in fact we have done them twice, but they refuse to let u be parents for the first time in our lives. We have been accused of being incompetent and indigent and unable to financially support our baby. We even took, and passed, parental capacity assessments, when we have never been parents before. Harper is our only that has been born alive, so this was our first and only opportunity to get the chance to be parents, and it was ripped away, my parents, Harper’s grandparents, are getting older and have been robbed of the joy of being grandparents, yet they still love him so much that tears roll down their faces when we look at photos of him or watch the videos from the very few, very infrequent visits that we have gotten with him. they roll down all of our faces. My husband has a lawyer, but it has been impossible to find one for myself since the one we hired to represent us as a single parental unit, as it should be, was told in court that he could not because we should be expecting that this would become a conflict of interest. I was given two days to get another lawyer, but because our families never dealt with crime or this kind of stuff, I had no clue who to hire and ended up hiring a lawyer with a lengthy, felony, drug cooking and trafficking criminal record, not to mention we found out that he was actually working for the foster nanny who has already adopted a baby she took out of the NICU on a different occasion. That one is 5 now, was eight days old when she took him out of the hospital and explained it to us as his parents “prolonged the process”, when describing the fight, the parents put up for their child, in order to keep him from being adopted. A fight that they lost to the state of Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, a fight that, as a mother, I just know that we are in right now as well. We have no idea what to do, and nobody will ever understand how frustrating that is, knowing that it all happened illegally, by a woman without the education background to be a certified babysitter, much less a DCS investigator.
I am so sorry to whoever might have read this sad, sob of a story, but please, if you did and you are here now, know that this is not a joke to us, in fact it is more like a death sentence. We used to be those people that believed if DCS got involved, they had a reason to do so, and we still believe that there are family’s that could benefit from services provided. Just know that there are also families like mine that have literally had their lives stolen from them, illegally, and children out there that are not having what is in their best interest provided to them.
I just dont even know where to even look for help at this point. I’m sorry.