I found the Wisconsin state law, which already has a provision allowing parents to request records.
Link. IANAL, but it looks like the confidentiality statute was enacted first, and then amended with an exception in the case of parents.
Which puts the libraries in the position of safeguarding the security of their patrons’ records, and makes them responsible for verifying that their patrons’ records don’t fall into the wrong hands.
If you think the lawsuits that could result from librarians staunchly refusing access to historical data to anyone at all are daunting, I’d think you’d blanch at the lawsuits that could result from a library mistakenly releasing a child’s reading history to a pedophile.
Ah, so it is about convenience. Maybe the thread should be re-titled “Dems want to make your children’s personal information more secure.”
Which is great, in that it doesn’t involve putting government employees in the untenable position of informing on a child’s attempts to educate themselves.
Once you get federal institutions involved, things become more complicated, and stuff like cost to taxpayer and possible benefits and harm of legislation has to be taken into account.
I guess what bothers me most about this, even more than putting librarians in the role of informants or making libraries start keeping patron histories on hand, is that it puts kids in a position where they have to get around federal regulations if they want to learn something. They’ll know that the library is no longer safe, that everything they do there will be monitored, and could be reported on. They’ll need to take measures to make sure that nothing they read which their parents may not approve of is recorded.
We’ll be teaching our kids that librarians can’t be trusted. And we’ll be teaching them subterfuge. All because some parents think that learning can be wrong.
Except that the “patrons” in this case are juveniles. You are treating them as if they were adults. Should a clinic be allowed to withold medical records from the parents of their juvenile “patrons”?
Back to my school analogy. How many lawsuits are you aware of initiated by parents against pedophiles who mistakenly were given the kid’s school records? I think the danger is much greater there (all kids go to schools, many fewer go to a library), and I’m not aware of a single instance of this happennig.
Nope. It’s not convenience, but when and under what circumstances the state can step between parent and child. I’m more concerned with making sure that parents can protect their children from the state than vice versa.
No more than a parent has the right to know what classes their kid takes at school. What if the proverbial “fundie parents” don’t want their kid to take a comparitive religion class. Should the state step between them and force the parents to allow their child to take the class?
There is nothing that requires the library to keep the check-out history on hand. In fact, I’d prefer they didn’t. As soon as a book is returned, erase any record that it was ever checked out by a particular person. I don’t think anyone is arguing that libraries should keep check-out histories for any purpose at all.
What it teaches is that parents have authority over children until a certain age. Unfortunately or not, that means parents get to make decisions for kids that we’d never allow one adult to make for another adult.
A sample of how librarians feel about wider issues of patron privacy: http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html features signs to put up in your library.
But this wasn’t originally about whether or not libraries were safe, or whether teenagers had access to books on subjects their parents might find objectionable. The original problem that sparked this issue was a parent trying to deal with their child’s overdue book and the library refusing to tell them which book they should be looking for.
Maybe I’m just missing the point, but I would expect that the hypothetical teenager with such restrictive, unfeeling and controlling parents would not be checking out and bringing these controversial books home from the library. The more common scenario (and one I deal with regularly) would be the not-so-organized child who can’t remember where they put their library books or how many they checked out, or which ones they checked out. If all my library could tell me was that I owed a fine and couldn’t tell me what book we should be looking for, I’d be unhappy. That is information that I need, as a parent, to help my child be more responsible. Our library system has always made current checkout information available to parents and I’ve never seen evidence of teenagers having problems feeling safe at the library. There’s always tons of them around anyway. Nor do parents need to involve librarians–you can access your accounts from your home, using only account numbers and birth dates. So, at least here, no librarian has to be actually involved in making moral decisions about releasing potentially harmful information.
Now, as I said before, if my library started keeping track of checkout history I’d be extremely unhappy–for my sake as well as that of my children. I can’t see any reason for ANYONE to be checking up on your history–not parents, not library administrators, not the FBI. And I would have a real problem with a parent who wanted that kind of information available to them–but that’s not my understanding of what was proposed.
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If the library has easy access to such information I think it would be silly to require a parent to get a subpoena to view it. Aren’t most libraries computerized these days? Since about 1987 every library I’ve been to has scanned my card and then scanned the book. I bet they know exactly what books I’ve checked out in the past few months if not years. I wouldn’t doubt if the librarian could just enter my card number and view the books I’ve checked out in the past few months.
I think you’re looking at only the negative aspects. Maybe a parent could be interested in what books a child is checking out for other less nefarious reasons.
Marc
If a group of wolves and sheep were voting on what to have for dinner, and the sheep weren’t allowed to vote, what do you think the result would be?
Absolutely, and in fact that’s how it already works a lot of the time. Many teenagers won’t seek medical help if they know their parents will be informed, and we’ve decided that in many cases, medical treatment is more important than a parent’s right to snoop.
I believe intellectual freedom is also more important than a parent’s right to snoop. As others have said, if parents are that concerned about what their kids are reading, why are they letting their kids go to the library unsupervised?
But if you think the right to snoop is more important than intellectual freedom, why stop at libraries? If your kid goes over to a neighbor’s house and reads Playboy or Mein Kampf, you might never know (gasp!). Why not pass a law forcing your neighbor to tell you what your kid reads at his house?
Absolutely. The parents wouldn’t have to be “forced” into anything - the class takes place at school, right?
The school just needs to say, “Sorry, our class schedules are made by a computer based on the students’ preferences. Parental objections are not a factor. Maybe you should look into home schooling.”
Ummmm… Sheep?
Parents = wolves? Kids = Sheep? Nope, not buying that analogy.
Note the extreme circumstances when this is allowed (from your cite):
Note also that the law in question also recognizes the “maturity” principle in that it affects children under the age of 16 only.
Sounds like you are recommending that schools deliberately lie to parents about their kids’ academics. Is this correct?
Parents want certain privileges that come at the expense of kids’ rights. Parents have the upper hand, and kids would be left out of any referendum on this issue. Of course it would pass, for the same reason as curfew laws and other age discrimination - it’s easy to vote away other people’s rights.
I’d like to draw your attention to this part:
While that confidentiality might not apply to all medical decisions, it does apply to “family planning” services, which is a big step in the right direction.
Nope. If they do what they say they do, there’s no lie. I’m recommending that a parent who goes to the school and objects to his child’s schedule choices should be politely shown the door.
Parent’s are also responsible for the actions of their kids. That’s why they get to trump the kids “rights” in most instances.
This is a tough area and I haven’t made up my mind on where I stand on that issue. While I can understand the point of allowing a pregnant teenage girl to get an abortion even if her parents object, I have a hard time accepting that the parents should not be informed. However, the thought of a doctor giving family planning advice to minors w/o the parent’s consent is, IMO, wrong.
It’s been quite awhile since I was in HS, but if memory serves me correct, the parents have to approve the course selections that kids make. Is that not the case? If so, then your recommendation would amount to lying. A course like Comparative Religion would be an elective. It would be an extremely rare instance where no other courses were available and that the parent couldn’t pick that as a non-selection for their kid if they so chose.
BTW, I’d think it was horrible parenting for a parent to do this. But I’d rather have that be the case than have the state intercede and tell the parents they have no say in their kids curriculum. After all, we certainly allow parents to send their kids to a private school in which the above course would not be allowed on the curriculum.
Yup. If the kid goes and shoots up the school, the parents will go to jail. Right? If a girl goes out and gets pregnant, her mom has a baby. If a kid gets thrown out of the house, the parents have to go live on the street.
Let me give you a big, fat “Wha?”
Sure, the actions of the kids affect the parents. But they affect the kids much more, and the bigger the action, the bigger the consequences for the kid. We have grown accustomed to fourteen, fifteen year old kids being tried as adults. We assume that they’re mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions at that age, even for something as enormous as murder.
And yet, we’re unwilling to let them browse library shelves unsupervised.
Absurd. Completely, totally, unbelievably absurd.
Parental approval was never the case in my high school. Scheduling was made on the basis of three things: 1) student sign-up 2) class availability and 3) the requirements established by the state for credits for graduation.
Other schools may differ, and probably do.
If a kid breaks the neighbor’s window, the parents are liable to pay to fix it. Wow. That was hard…
Did I not make it clear that I thought the whole thing was generally a bad idea? But I accept that parents, as voters, can elect to pass a law allowing them to do this. If they do, I would not want the state to step in and say: “No you can’t”. That’s all.
Bweh?
Wow. So… what are we arguing about again? Because you’ve been defending the heck out of this, on its own merits, for some time now. If I’d known this was a discussion of the fact that legislators pass some stupid laws to pander to paranoid special interest groups, I’d have expected there to be a chorus of millions joining in, all chanting “Nooooo kidding.”
Keeping in mind, of course, that it’s not the parents who are passing this legislation. From the OP:
That settles it, though. I’m never moving to Wisconsin.
FYI, From one of the very first exchanges we had:
Anyway, I think we’ve run this into the ground. It’s been fun.
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I’m not sure what rights are being violated. Minors aren’t little adults and shouldn’t be treated as such. In general they have no right to freedom of association, free expression, protection from search and seizure, etc. At least so far as their parents are conerned.
That seems rather silly. Let’s say little Billy can’t seem to keep his grades up while he’s on the football team. Little Billy’s parents decide that learning is more important then playing so forbid him from signing up for football the next year. He signs up anyway and when the parents go to the school to get his schedule changed they are informed that this is Billy’s choice and the administration politely shows them the door.
Marc
Stupidest. Law. Ever.
No, really. The library won’t tell you which books your kid has overdue? Either have the kid request the info, or start looking for the book with the barcode on the cover, the filing info on the spine, the pouch in the back inside cover, and “Property of X Library” stamped in it. Library books are pretty damned hard to get confused with your own property, unless you regularly shop the library sales. If your child is so hopelessly careless and disorganized that he or she doesn’t have any clue where the books might be, and you have no idea how many books are checked out or which ones, then you need to be more involved in what your kid is doing.
Being more involved in what your kid is doing does NOT mean going to the library and demanding a list of what they’ve checked out, currently or in the past. It means paying attention to your kid, talking to him, asking her questions she might not like to answer, knowing who he hangs out with and where they go together, what her interests are. If you’re so uninvolved in your child’s life that you don’t know these things and can’t find out on your own, it is most emphatically not the job of the library, or the mall, or the movie rental place to tell you. Those places exist to provide a service, not to keep tabs on your kid for you.
This law, as I understand it, isn’t about making it possible for parents to know what their kid is up to, because there are plenty of other ways for an active, involved parent to know what a kid’s doing and reading. This isn’t even about parents having the right to know what they’re fiscally responsible for, because there are other ways to get that information that are far faster, simpler, and less expensive than passing new legislation. There’s really no good to come of this law, not for good parents. The only benefit is to people who want keep their kids from learning, or those who want an easy out for keeping tabs on their kids. Frankly, those people shouldn’t be encouraged.
Marc, you do realize, of course, that football is an extracurricular activity and as such it is not a part of a student’s class schedule. Taking a kid out of an extracurricular activity, assuming said kid isn’t in violation of any “no pass, no play” rules, is purely between the kid, the parent, and the coach. The administration isn’t involved in any way, shape, or form.
Your analogy might be reasonable if you were talking about the kid taking woodshop instead of calculus, as those are both actual classes that the school has a hand in scheduling.
My analogy is reasonable. In many schools students involved in extracurricular activities such as band, drama, orchestra, basketball, football, etc. are required to enroll in an actual class. I don’t know if that’s the case in Wisconsin but it is the case in Texas. When a person fails they’re simply barred from partipation in extracurricular activites. They still show up to class and spend that period doing whatever everyone else is. In the case of band, orchestra, or drama they might still have homework.
Marc
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As far as I’m concerned if they can’t be bothered to tell me what book they want I don’t see why I should be bothered to look for it. They must not want it back that bad. If I don’t have access to the information then I guess I’m not responsible for replacing it.
Marc