6/3/03 -- NSBA is concerned about legislation under consideration in Congress that would restrict school personnel from advising parents that their children might need medication.
The Child Medication Safety Act (H.R. 1170) was passed by the House May 21 on a vote of 425-1. It would require states to establish policies prohibiting school personnel from requiring children to take medication as a condition for attending school. States that fail to have such policies would risk losing all federal education funds.
"School personnel may have good intentions, but parents should never be required to decide between their child's education and keeping them off potentially harmful drugs," says the bill's sponsor, Rep. Max Burns (R-Ga.).
"In recent decades, more and more children have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and then treated with medications such as Ritalin or Adderall," says Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), chair of the Committee on Education and Workforce.
"In many of these cases, school personnel freely offer diagnoses for these disorders and urge parents to obtain drug treatment for the child," Boehner says. "Sometimes officials even attempt to force parents into choosing between medicating their child and remaining in the classroom."
"The recent movement in Congress to legislate the availability and use of medication for students, while holding federal funding hostage, is a real concern," says NSBA Associate Executive Director Michael A. Resnick.
"The bill was a response to anecdotal problems," he says, "and, before proceeding, a real effort needs to be made to gather more information about the severity or widespread nature of the problem and how school districts can appropriately address the issue."
Connecticut, Minnesota, Illinois, and Virginia have passed laws preventing school personnel from requiring that parents medicate their child in order to attend school.
Georgia, Hawaii, North Carolina, Utah, and Texas have established commissions or enacted resolutions to investigate this issue or encourage schools to use proven methods of addressing behavior problems instead of relying on medication.
Organizations representing mental health professionals oppose H.R.1170. A letter sent by 10 such groups May 12 to Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.), chair of the education reform subcommittee, says, "We are deeply concerned with legislation that would restrict school professionals from communicating with families about legitimate mental health-related concerns."
While the letter notes that the bill does not explicitly prohibit such communication, it says, it "would inevitably have a chilling effect."
"Given the bill's stern enforcement provisions," it continues, "classroom teachers and other school personnel could be expected to be highly fearful of the risks of speaking freely with families about a student's emotional and behavioral well-being or of recommending a mental health evaluation."
According to the mental health organizations, while there have been "highly publicized and isolated incidents" of school personnel conditioning school attendance on children being medicated, "there is no reliable evidence that such practices regularly occur or that this is a pervasive problem."
"The coercive use of psychotropic drugs on children is not a few 'isolated' incidents, but is impacting hundreds, if not thousands, of families across the United States," claimed Utah State Rep. Katherine Bryson at a hearing on H.R. 1170 May 6.
According to Bryson, "Parents are losing their right to choose." Children who come to school unable to read, with improper nutrition, and possibly exposed to lead, mercury, or other toxic substance, are being labeled as having a learning disorder or ADHD.
"From here, parents are being coerced into drugging their child with threats of the child's expulsion or charges of medical neglect," she says. Instead of getting tutoring, they're getting "a 'quick fix' drug like Ritalin."
Dr. Lance Clawson, an adolescent psychiatrist in Bethesda, Md., testified that the more pressing issue is the "unacceptably high number of children with mental illnesses that are not being diagnosed or treated."
Clawson, testifying on behalf of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, cited a 2000 report by the Surgeon General that said 12 million children and adolescents aged 9 to 17 have a diagnosable mental or emotional illness, and fewer than 20 percent of them receive treatment.