Dive Brief:

• Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has issued a formal opinion on the subject of parental permission for a public healthy survey, saying that schools do not have to obtain parental consent before having students complete the anonymous questionnaire.
• Coffman's opinion comes in response to a debate among the Colorado State Board of Education, which had considered requiring parental consent after some derided the survey's sex and drug-centric questions as inappropriate and invasive.
• The survey has been issued for almost 25 years now and is considered essential by public health officials because it helps them track hazardous trends and behaviors common among teens.

Dive Insight:

According to Coffman, the survey is voluntary as is, so it should not require parental permission. So why else shouldn't Colorado issue parental permission slips for a health survey? How about the case of Kansas, where a privacy law meant to deal with the Common Core accidentally affected the dissemination of its public health survey. The law mandated that all surveys dealing with sex, religion, or family life be given the "OK" by parents, which in turn resulted in a massive drop in the number of students filling out the survey — a big issue for public health researchers who rely on the data to follow teen trends and help come up with safety suggestions. After the law was enacted, the number of students filling out the annual Kansas Communities That Care survey dropped by 75%. And much of that decrease was not necessarily because parents were against the survey, but rather because of disorganization (i.e., parents forgetting to return paper slips or schools printing them out too late).