Members of the Tennessee General Assembly will consider a bill that mandates public school and charter school officials screen students to evaluate how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their mental and behavioral health patterns.
This, according to legislation that State Sen. Katrina Robinson (D-Memphis) filed last month.
If legislators approve the plan then school systems would evaluate kindergarten through eighth-grade students, according to the language of the bill.
Members of the Williamson County-based Tennessee Stands said they disapprove of Robinson’s bill. In a recent emailed newsletter to supporters, Tennessee Stands described it as “a mini wellbeing check.”
“[It] gives state oversight over mental health for students K-8 without parental consent and creates funding for full-time psychologists and social workers for school districts,” Tennessee Stands said.
Tennessee Stands is a nonprofit. According to its website, members of the group focus on individual liberties.
Robinson’s bill would also require that Local Education Agencies notify students’ parents in writing before they perform mental or behavioral health screenings upon students.
Written notices, the bill went on to say, must include the following:
• The purpose for the screening
• The provider or contractor providing the screening
• The date and time that school officials have scheduled the screenings
• The length of time the screening may last
The bill, if enacted into law, would add more than $5.3 million to the state’s expenditures for Fiscal Year 2021-2022 and subsequent years, according to the bill’s summary. The bill would require that education officials fund one full-time school psychologist for every 2,500 or fewer students and one full-time social worker for every 2,000 or fewer students.
As The Tennessee Star reported last month, another bill in the legislature would give local school boards and charter schools more legal powers to create their own quarantine policies and implement those policies in an emergency. Members of Tennessee Stands endorsed that bill.
Also as reported, Robinson, already in legal trouble on alleged embezzlement and wire fraud charges, learned last month that her legal problems have only intensified.
Federal officials charged Robinson in a new case, along with two other co-defendants, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. Federal officials said the allegations against Robinson pertain to The Healthcare Institute, based in Memphis. Robinson directs the institute, which trains people in the healthcare field.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Life on Campus” by Amariotti CC3.0.
She would have to be a Democrat from Memphis. an irrelevant politician. Democrats and their commie teacher unions are the morons that kept schools closed anyway. She should have been screened before she was allowed to run for office, so her mentality capacity could have been evaluated!
Covid-19 is the gift that keeps on giving to progressives (tyrants-in-waiting). Every avenue of life is now at risk from those who see Covid-19 as the ideal mechanism for invading these avenues with more and more government “oversight” and regulation. I hope and pray that Tennessee legislators will put an end to these growing intrusions into the private lives of Tennessee citizens.
Like a cancer, they will ask for and demand greater control of your lives and kids. It seems the authorities feel that the parent should lose all control over what takes place in their children’s lives. In a lot of locations schools are pushing every sexual deviant they can in the name of diversity and the racial equality. It will appear in your community if hasn’t all ready, and no matter how you dress it up, it is still government control. As the saying goes, “Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean I’m not being watched.”
More government over- reach. Besides , why does a smaller school get a social worker , and a larger school get a psychologist? Why does someone with letters after their name suddenly get to say they know more about and what is best for a child in an hour , or 2 hours , or fill in the blank, than the parents know after raising the child his whole life?
What a pompous arse! How about we screen candidates running for public office? Virtues like honesty, integrity and fiscal responsibility would be a great place to start.
In a sense, we’d be implementing term limits. Few elected politicians, once in office, would pass muster come reelection time!
Most importantly, screen them vs. their oath to uphold the State and U.S. Constitutions, especially the State Declaration of Rights and Bill of Rights as read by THE WORDS ACCORDING TO THE RULES OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR!!
Lol, maybe Memphis could screen Chicken Bucket Man after 4 years of TDS as a pilot project.
What exactly would screening a student today tell them about their condition a year ago (for which there is no data) and how would these folks purport to attribute any changes (which they are not able to measure) to the Coronahoax?
I wonder if Robinson remembers the Columbia University Teen Screen program funded by Pfizer that resulted in the vast majority of students subjected to the “free” screenings being prescribed SSRI drugs?