TeenScreen officials appear to have been having a hard time getting their program accepted by schools, parents and students across the U.S. — so hard a time that they've experimented with various methods to sidestep the written parental consent they MUST GET BY LAW for a student to participate in their screening program. One of the methods they've used is Passive Consent Forms, wherein if a parent DOESN'T sign, it is assumed they have approved their child to be screened. Click to see a copy of one of their Passive Consent Forms used at Penn High School in Mishawaka, Indiana. In one Wisconsin school, parents were informed of the screening with a notice posted in the "back to school" section of the local newspaper. (Hayden & Lizasuain, 1998) If parents there did not want their child to be screened they would have had to write a note and send it into school asking to exclude their child from screening. When was the last time you read the "back to school" section of your local newspaper? If you didn't, you just consented.

A new dodge—make TeenScreen part of the curriculum
A federal law known as the Protection of Pupil Rights Act, requires written parental consent before a child undergoes any survey, analysis or evaluation. TeenScreen’s newsletter, Fall 2003, Vol 2, Issue 2, discusses making screening a part of the school's curriculum as a method to bypass this law and use passive consent instead. The fact of the matter is that active consent by parents has produced dismal results for the program, as admitted by TeenScreen officials.

TeenScreen's Fall 2003 Newsletter falsely states:

TeenScreen's "curriculum dodge" refuted by U.S. Dept. of Education
When TeenScreen’s statements were brought to the attention of the United States Department of Education, their lie was exposed. Here is Jim Bradshaw's response, correcting the false announcement:

Why didn't TeenScreen simply follow the law and have parents sign approval slips so their children can be psychologically screened?
From transcripts of presentations given by TeenScreen staff (Laurie Flynn and Leslie McGuire) they freely admit that it is difficult to get parents to sign the approval forms. This seems to be why they resort to various dodges such as Passive Consent and Curriculum Bypass as shown above. Could it be that there is a general public mistrust of psychological and psychiatric screening by American parents? You be the judge—and let us know if anything like this has happened in your area.

New Update - TeenScreen changes their consent policy
In May of 2006, possibly due to pressure from concerned parents and organizations, TeenScreen changed their consent policy to say that all school-based screening sites must now use their new "active" consent forms. However, their new policy also states that written consent is to be gotten from participants themselves rather than their parents if the student is 18 or older. All Teen Screen has to do is wait till the child is 18, get the permission from the student in writing, and administer the test without any written permission from the parent. Since most children are 18 at some point during their senior year, TeenScreen has just improved their chances of getting your child screened, all they need to do is wait.

Also of concern is that this policy refers to school screening sites only. What about the screenings that take place in school-based health care (SBHC) programs? These programs are run by outside mental health care providers in a setting other than the school. And what about the screenings that occur in foster care, juvenile detention or run-away homes? TeenScreen's new policies do not cover these points.

Is TeenScreen free? How much is it actually costing your school?
TeenScreen says its program is free. However, we found their cached pages of the actual costs in thousands of dollars to schools using the TeenScreen program depending on which "screening model" the school chooses. Where will this money come from, especially with schools across the nation that are chronically short of funds. Note that it appears TeenScreen intentionally deleted the original pages containing this information from their site, but not before we were able to save copies of them via Google's cached pages feature. The graphics that were originally on the pages are no longer available. Click to view.

In one study done by David Shaffer and Leslie McGuire, they estimated screening costs at $37 per student screened; $250 per student referred for further clinical assessment, and $25,000 per 1,000 students screened (Shaffer & Craft, 1999), [Craft is McGuire's maiden name] although neither the exact formula or any details on calculating costs was included in
the paper. With the high rate of false-positives the majority of the students go on to "further clinical assessment" at $250 a pop. In another study, (Gutierrez et al. 2004) it was found that without the financial and staffing support of the research team, the school staff would not have been capable of administering the screening program.

Perhaps this is why Columbia University funds a number of the TeenScreen programs being run at the schools. In one school district, Columbia University gave a total of $20,000 to the City of Erie, PA for them to be able to run their TeenScreen program (page 14). The question now is: "What's the vested interest here?"

The TeenScreen Assent Form:
Answer every screening question or you're a "positive"

When it is time for the child to do the screening they are given an Assent Form to fill out. Part “d” of this form states:

“d) I have been told that participation in this program is voluntary and that I am not required to do any of these things if I don't want to. I may also refuse to answer any and all questions.”

This is true, a student can refuse to answer any questions. However, TeenScreen's own materials state that if a child refuses to answer a question, the answer should be taken as a "positive screen". Any child that doesn't wish to disclose personal information will automatically be labeled as testing positive in regards to that question. This seems a convenient method of diagnosis with no information.

Through inquiries to schools around the nation, it has been discovered that the TeenScreen computer test is set up so that you can not refuse to answer any questions, the computer will not allow you to skip, the child must answer the questions or be automatically labeled as "positive".

On TeenScreen’s paper and pencil screening, if you refuse to answer, TeenScreen says that is an indication, in and of itself, of a positive screen and you are then directed to the clinician!

When a Positive is a Negative
Even TeenScreen's terminology seems designed for acceptance of psychiatric labels. It's interesting that a child tests "positive" for a "negative characteristic". This terminology is a borrowing from medical doctors and is an attempt at legitimizing the psychiatric viewpoint that problems are physical "diseases". A person who has a particular microbe, virus or bacteria "tests positive" in medical terminology, yet not one single test has yet to produce any kind of diagnostic indicator of mental disorders as actual diseases. If this information were well known, mental health practitioners might not be able to bill insurance companies for their fees and medications.

TeenScreen claims to have nothing to do with treatment recommendations — but they only funnel their "product" into mental health treatment, never any other type of treatment, including medical!