Parents shut down in Legislature while speaking against school health centers

A concerned parent group is speaking out against a bill that would put health centers on high school and middle school campuses throughout the state.

House Bill 2288 states that “any school district in the state may enter into agreements with health care providers to establish school-based health centers for the provision of services exclusively to district students, employees, and employees’ dependents … [in] the form of a lease of district property to private or public health care providers.”

“It doesn’t seem like a bad thing, until you understand … that parents, starting at the age of 13, have been completely cut out from knowing what their children are receiving in their medical and mental health care,” said Kim Wendt of Informed Parents of Washington.

She was referring to a new law that went into effect this year that keeps “sensitive conditions” — including anxiety and depression, gender dysphoria, STDs, and reproductive issues — confidential between health care providers and patients over the age of 13. While parents’ insurance still covers this care, parents only find out what conditions are being treated if the children elect to share this information with them.

Dori: New health insurance law cuts you out of your kids’ decisions

“We don’t even know why we are being billed — you just get sent a blank bill,” Wendt told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

On Monday, Informed Parents of Washington traveled to Olympia to testify against HB 2288 during a House Education Committee hearing.

“The danger of this bill is … it creates a barrier where the school district cannot be sued by parents if something goes wrong because everything that happens in the clinic is the responsibility of the clinic,” Wendt said. “And then it also opens up the funding stream for the school district and the insurance to be billed to the parents — and they won’t even know what the services are that their children are getting during their lunch hours.”

After listening to legislators extol the bill’s merits, Informed Parents of Washington gave testimony as to why they found the bill dangerous. Soon the parents found their words cut off by the bang of a gavel.

“I understand that they felt like we were being inflammatory, but I didn’t make the laws — I’m just reporting them out, and trying to get other parents to understand that they’re slowly, taking away, law by law, our ability to be the parents to our children, and then just making us their personal ATMs,” Wendt said.

Wendt believes that this bill, along with a bill for K-12 sexual education, are part of a worldwide agenda to change society through sex education.

“It’s a movement to fundamentally change how we view sex and interrelate with one another,” she said.

As of now, there is no plan to include Planned Parenthood in these health centers, but Wendt said that similar clinics in California schools have partnered with Planned Parenthood.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.