On Thursday, New York-based radio host and parent advocate Shannon Joy uncovered a federal public school survey given to children as young as ten years of age, which includes inquiries regarding oral sex, sexting, thoughts of suicide, cocaine, and invasive questions concerning their home life. Quickly, other parents, too, voiced their concern over the racy and intimate survey flagged by Joy.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, the survey, called the “National Youth Risk Behavior Survey,” is distributed across the nation every two years, last passed out in 2015.
“Am I NUTS or should this concern parents?” wrote Joy on her Facebook page.
“Monroe County schools survey 6-12th graders every 2 years as a part of national Youth Risk Survey, funded by the National Institute for Health,” she wrote. “I just read through the questionnaire and was a bit taken aback by many of the questions posed to kids as young as 11.”
Joy posted a compilation of some of the most troubling questions. (Such questions can be confirmed here.)
As compiled by The Newman Report, a version of the survey given to middle schoolers in the Rochester-based Fairport Central School District includes:
How often did a parent or adult in your home swear at you, insult you or put you down?
How often has a parent or adult in your home hit, beat, kick or physically hurt you in any way?
How often has your family not had enough money to buy food or pay for housing?
How often did your parents or adults in your home slap, kick, punch or beat each other up?
Have you ever lived with anyone who was an alcoholic, problem drinker, used illegal street drugs, took prescription drugs to get high or was a problem gambler?
“Some of these questions were outrageous,” Joy told The Newman Report’s Alex Newman, and are “worded in leading ways to make kids believe that all the other kids are doing it,” she added.
The radio host noted that the “invasive” questions could implant harmful thoughts in children’s mind that weren’t previously there: “If you constantly talk to kids about suicide, and ask them if they are suicidal, they might start having suicidal thoughts,” she said.
Joy also raised concerns over the supposed anonymity of the survey. Per The Newman Report:
While the answers are supposedly anonymous, Joy noted that the survey’s are completed on children’s school-issued devices—some of which have unique ID numbers. “So there are questions about this,” she said. Indeed, as The Newman Report documented recently, schools are now gathering all sorts of psychological and psychiatric data on children without any serious constraints.
Combined with the gutting of “FERPA” privacy regulations by Obama, there is now “virtually zero privacy protections for students, allowing schools to share private data with virtually anyone, including corporations and government, and parents will not even be notified.”
Joy told The Daily Wire that some parents from neighboring districts informed her that they were denied copies of the survey and were made to go into the school to merely view it.
“The most terrifying thing here is that this is all happening under a Republican administration,” Joy added.
Other parents expressed similar concern, one parent writing via Facebook: “I remember taking these surveys as a middle schooler, and thinking it was odd … and now as an adult, with my own child, it bothers me even more.”
“HOME. SCHOOL!” succinctly wrote another commenter.