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After six months of discussion, Isle of Wight County’s School Board voted 3-2 on Sept. 19 to readopt its policy governing the surveying of students.

Policy JOB gives parents 30 days to opt their children out of participation in any survey requesting that students provide sexual, mental health or medical information or controlled-substance usage. The 30-day window is mandated in state law and is unchanged from the version of the policy the School Board last adopted in 2019. Also unchanged is verbiage prohibiting the administration of sex-related surveys to students in kindergarten through sixth grade, and a requirement that surveys at all grade levels, unless required by federal or state law, not disclose a student’s personally identifying information.

What’s changed since 2019, and has been the subject of the six-month debate, is verbiage requiring parents to opt out of having their children surveyed, rather than opt in.

Specifically, the discussion has centered around the Virginia School Survey of Climate and Working Conditions, which is administered in partnership between the Virginia Department of Education and the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. The 2024 survey, administered January through April, included questions such as, “Has anyone offered, sold, or given you alcohol or drugs while at school, at a school-sponsored event, on a school bus or on your way to or from school this year?” and asked students to rank on a scale of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” statements such as “students at this school are bullied about their sexual orientation.

Board member John Collick joined Chairman Jason Maresh and board member Michael Cunningham in supporting the “opt out” verbiage.

“I think the spirit and intent of the concern is whether or not parents’ children are being surveyed about health, drug use, alcohol, sex, family issues, so on and so forth, and each one of those specific topics are addressed in the DCJS survey, which again is required as a part of the annual security and safety audit,” Maresh said.

Deputy Superintendent Susan Goetz said the division provides three separate notification methods – email, the school’s website and each school’s newsletter – during the 30-day opt-out window.

In order to have accurate results on the state-mandated DCJS survey, “we must have 80% of our students take the survey,” Goetz said. “I do not believe that if we go with an opt-in on such a survey that we will hit that 80% mark.”

Inaccurate results could “negatively reflect our school division because we don’t have the full safety audit completed,” Goetz said.

The 2023 survey results, the most recent available on the DCJS website, were based on responses of 878 middle school students, which ranked Isle of Wight’s school atmosphere at an average 3.6 score on a scale of one, or “very negative” to six, or “very positive.”

The opt-out option, rather than an opt-in, “is coming directly out of Virginia code,” IWCS spokeswoman Lynn Briggs told the board. “We are not creating this language. We have lifted it from Virginia code and inserted it here. The only language really that is not from code is now we’re going to notify families, because the code doesn’t speak to that, and it does not reference the Virginia school survey from the DCJS, which is really what this pertains to, which is why we added that as a reference.”

“This was presented for a first read in April, on the second read in May it was tabled,” Maresh said. “It didn’t come back up for a second read until August, last month, so here we are in September looking at the second read that last month we agreed would be up for a vote based off staff’s recommendations. We have admittedly ended up right back where we started.”

“I can reluctantly support an opt-out for the DCJS because we’re trying to keep our schools safe and this is definitely part of it,” Collick said. “Identifying the mental health of our children anonymously may help us out.”

Two parents – Candice Vande Brake and Heidi Swartz – objected publicly to the questions posed to students in the DCJS survey in 2022 and reiterated their concerns during the public comment period at the start of the meeting. 

“Four of the sitting board members ran on supporting parental rights,” Swartz said, stating she too favored an “opt-in.”

Maresh, among the candidates who ran on a parental-rights platform in 2022 and again in 2023 for his first full four-year term on the board, said statements he’d made during his campaigns, which Vande Brake and Swartz each quoted, “I still stand by today.”

“I certainly do,” Maresh said. “I’m 150% in support of giving parents a voice in their children’s education. But everything is important to have a little bit of context.”