As we look active consent as it relates to the current administration and their priorities in education and children, we know that there will be continuing changes over the next four years. Education systems and organizations across the United States will likely have to make many adjustments.
As we navigate these changes together, I want this blog series to help every school and community member dedicated to student well-being and effective learning environments to inform ways that will protect our students and prevent students from harmful behaviors. Overall, this series will:
- offer strategies and actions you can take to adjust to new policies while creating the best possible environments for learning in your schools; and
- give you some background and facts about how the legislation – both federal and state level – might affect your work.
For community coalition work in drug prevention that requires a data collection component to support funding of drug prevention grants, perhaps the most threatening element of change will be the movement to require “active parental consent” for students to participate in health behavior surveys. This could mean that you’ll no longer be able to use the previous standard, a “passive consent” approach, where only dissenting parents submit an “opt-out” form. With active consent, every parent will have to sign off on, or approve of, their child’s participation in any survey that they participate in, including student health surveys.
Other topics we’ll explore in this series will include:
- Three Ways ISA Protects Students’ Rights
- How to Develop a Strategic Communication Plan to Support Your Drug Prevention Goals
- How to Work with Your School Board
- How Groups Across the Country Are Shaping Educational Policy using the Parents Bill of Rights
We will start this series with information and strategies surrounding active consent. All of us in the prevention and data collection fields recognize active consent for the headache it is. Here, we’ll look at the options to manage it because, let’s face it, active consent is coming, and in many states, it’s already here.
A Brief Tutorial: Passive vs. Active Consent
Passive Consent. If you’ve been working with student health behavior surveys for even one administration period, you are familiar with active vs. passive consent. Skip to next section for information, “Potential Impact of Active Consent.”
In the 40-year history of ISA Data, active consent, with a few exceptions, has rarely been used as a policy anywhere in the United States. Most states and communities have opted to use a passive consent approach. With passive consent, parents/guardians are provided a description of the survey; they can choose to “opt out” of the survey if they don’t want their child to participate for any reason. In this approach, the only paperwork returned to schools is from dissenting parents, typically a low percentage, resulting in a reasonable administrative task and a representative number of students participating in the survey.
The parent notification offers information about the survey, including how ISA Data procedures safeguard a student’s right to privacy and anonymity. The data collected will never expose individual student responses. We look at groups and trends based on the collective data of the school or community being surveyed and, if requested, other cohort comparisons. All ISA Data strategies for protecting a student’s privacy are based on the small- and large-scale data collection processes we pioneered in the early 1980s. In addition, the survey is voluntary for all students. Even if a parent has not submitted the “opt-out” form, a student who doesn’t want to take the survey on the day of administration is not obligated to participate in the survey.
Active Consent. In contrast, the active consent approach, as you can imagine, requires every student to have an agreement form signed by a parent or guardian to allow the student to participate in the survey. Paper forms or electric platforms are designed to collect parent/guardian signatures and must be matched with each student sitting for the survey. The administrative burden increases exponentially, and the response rate will likely be less robust, but it can be done. For example, New Jersey had required explicit permission from each parent for their students to participate in our surveys for many years. While they were successful in recruiting adequate school and student participation, they knew their efforts were being hampered by the active consent policy. To their relief, in 2021, the state legislature, adopted Assembly Bill Number 5597,[1] which ended active consent and enacted a passive consent system to notify parents of their rights to opt-out if they chose.
We could hope that states across the country would learn from New Jersey’s experience but it seems that with the emerging Parents’ Rights Bills, many states will require active consent. In our upcoming post, The Parents’ Bill of Rights, we’ll provide a closer look at federal and local efforts to pass legislation to protect parents’ rights, including their right to allow (or not) their children to participate in health behavior surveys.
Potential Impact of Active Consent.
In effect, moving from passive to active consent places an additional burden on the school that must track signatures, on the parents who have additional emails and paperwork to fill out for their child, and on the organization collecting the data. Perhaps most troubling is that active consent is known to result in lower response rates. In fact, one study compared the results of response rates for schools using either active or passive consent for one survey on suicidal ideation. The mailed passive consent forms received a 100% participation rate whereas the schools using various forms of active consent received between a 1.5% and 22.9% participation rate.
The immediate consequence of this kind of shift to active consent is that the schools become leery of the additional burden of work, concerned about potentially poor response rates, and fearful of legal consequences should a mistake be made while conducting the student survey. So, they decline to participate. In this scenario, as a longer-term consequence, the schools no longer receive student data to inform them of student needs for issues like substance use or mental health and depression. Without the data, schools then lose out on program funding, which requires data to show program effectiveness. Looking even further, the lack of data results in reduced or no funding, depriving students of effective programs, and worsening outcomes such as depression, suicide, and substance abuse. In turn, the community will see lower test scores, less healthy children and more risk of mental health breakdowns in school settings.[2]
References:
[1] McGovern, M. Good News for Public Health: New Jersey School Passive Consent Law Passed July 2, 2021. Prevention Is Key. Aug 4, 2021. https://www.preventioniskey.org/good-news-for-public-health/
[2] Tortura CM, Kutash K, Labouliere CD, Karver MS. Evaluating active parental consent procedures for school programming addressing the sensitive topic of suicide prevention. J Sch Health. 2017; 87(2):114-120. Doi:10.1111/josh.12473.Coming soon: look for our next post in this series, Active Consent in Your State: Five Strategies to Gain Participation
Contact ISA Data for advice on best practices for survey recruitment in an active consent state.
