Mom Shares The Highly Concerning Questionnaire Sent Out By Her Daughter’s School That A Lawyer Advises Not To Fill Out
The form is shockingly intrusive — and school officials had no idea where it even came from.
fizkes / Shutterstock.com A mom in Washington was shocked and unsettled by a bizarre questionnaire sent out by her daughter's school district. After she learned that school officials were totally unaware of the matter, she vowed to continue digging until she got answers.
The bizarrely intrusive school health questionnaire went way beyond the usual medical questions.
School health questionnaires are a standard procedure in many school districts to ensure the school is aware of a student's medical history and things like allergies should health issues arise during the school day.
Many parents balk at these simply because they're so time-consuming. But the questionnaire that mom and TikToker @lauren1xoxo received went well beyond merely being tedious.
The questionnaire was handed out to every student — thousands of them at multiple schools — by the school nurse, who told each student that she needed it back "immediately." The whole situation left Lauren "baffled."
"I need you to help me figure out if it's weird or not," said on TikTok, "because it seems weird to me." Nearly everyone who saw her wildly viral video wholeheartedly agreed.
The intrusive school health questionnaire asked for extensive details about her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter.
After asking normal questions about her daughter's history of things like asthma and diabetes, "There’s another section asking about my pregnancy and her birth," Lauren said. She then began reading off the form's questions.
"'Was it a normal pregnancy? Yes or no? Please explain. Was the delivery a vaginal delivery? A C-section? Was it scheduled? Was it emergency? Were there any complications — please explain.'"
That alone seems inappropriate, but the form probed even deeper. "'Was she born full-term, premature or overdue? How many weeks gestation was she when she was born? Was she a single birth? A twin, or other? ... How much did she weigh?'"
Nothing about the form added up. "Why are you asking this," Lauren questioned. "She's 13. She's almost 14. It's halfway through the year. She hasn't signed up for any sports or clubs or PE or anything like that, that would warrant a new health questionnaire."
Other parents and an attorney felt the questions were way out of line, and once she began investigating, the story got stranger.
"It's giving 'Handmaid's Tale,'" one TikTok viewer commented on the video — one of scores of people who all had the same thought, given the current right-wing hysteria about reproductive rights, trans and LGBTQ+ rights, and the legislative wars conservatives are currently waging in school districts across the country.
Many wondered if this was the underlying purpose of the form — to try to suss out potential transgender kids in the school district, perhaps, despite Washington state's progressive policies on gender, reproductive, and LGBTQ+ rights issues.
An attorney on TikTok raised other alarms, saying that intrusive forms like this are often used to build "failure to thrive" cases against parents by child protective services departments, and warned against filling it out for this reason. However, many others, including those who claimed to work in such services, felt this too was a stretch.
Lauren flatly refused to fill out the questionnaire in any case. But when her daughter kept pushing for her to do so, she began asking questions.
Her daughter revealed that she and her fellow students had essentially been bribed with a pizza party and a "Pajama Day" for filling out the form. This further fueled Lauren's indignant search for an explanation. Unfortunately, her digging would be almost entirely fruitless.
No school officials knew the form existed, and it seems the nurse may have sent out the questionnaire without telling anyone.
From multiple school district health coordinators to the school principal himself, not one person Lauren spoke to had ever seen or even heard of the questionnaire. The principal himself was "embarrassed" and perplexed since anything sent to parents and students was supposed to be approved by him first.
Lauren then called the superintendent — also unaware — which finally resulted in a more senior health official digging into the matter. She found that the nurse who sent out the form had immediately gone on vacation after doing so and now could not be reached.
Suddenly, the situation seemed even shadier. "This nurse took it upon herself to just print out a thousand of these forms, send it out to multiple schools, and nobody noticed," Lauren said indignantly. "She went completely rogue and flew under the radar."
And both she and many commenters feel that nothing about this story adds up. As one commenter put it, "I have a hard time believing the principal didn’t know when there were prizes for turning the form in." Lauren herself said she feels like "somebody knows; they just don’t want to tell me anything."
Lauren has been left outraged by the lack of oversight and urged other parents to learn an important lesson from this weird fiasco: Keep an eye on what is going on at your kids' schools.
"I don't necessarily think that there was any malicious intent behind this; I don't think it was a big conspiracy to get information from our kids," she said, "but I also don't know that it wasn't."
"I don't know what this person's motives were," she continued, "and that's what I'm gonna continue to try and find out." That's probably a good idea because with the culture wars being waged in schools nowadays, you unfortunately can't be too careful.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.