A Permission Slip to Be Human

Texas wants to regulate the moment a teacher asks a kid how they're doing, and here is why parents, teachers, and child advocates across the country should also care.

A teacher notices a student has been quiet for a few days and asks, “Hey, how are you doing?” A coach pulls a player aside after practice because something seems off. A counselor stops a kid in the hallway to check in during a hard week.

None of that is therapy. It’s not a screening. It’s not a clinical intervention. It’s just what a decent adult does when they’re paying attention to a kid.

Under a new rule the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has proposed, it might require a permission slip.

TEA’s Proposed Rule

To implement Senate Bill 12, a Texas parental rights bill that affects children’s education and health care, TEA is proposing a rule — 19 TAC §103.1105 — that sets out how school districts must notify parents and obtain consent before a student receives certain mental, emotional, or physical health services.

The law began from the premise that parental authority should be close to absolute inside a school building, and that a child’s well-being is best protected by maximizing parental authority rather than by asking what a specific kid, in a specific situation, actually needs in public schools.

The proposed rule is solely focused on parental rights. The language is rather sweeping, as section (c) reads:

Parents rights and access to information may not be restricted. Unless otherwise provided by or in accordance with other law, parental rights. . .must not be infringed upon by a school district, nor may a district withhold information from a parent regarding their student.

The definition of a parent with such sweeping language only limits parents whose “rights have been terminated” or “whose rights have been modified by court in relation to parental rights and duties.” Beyond the matter of how schools are supposed to know this information about every parent, granting parents such sweeping rights would include situations school staff regularly encourage, including:

• A parent whom a child fears or considers dangerous to them, including fear of physical or emotional abuse and rejection.

• A parent who has a family violence protective order against them, sought by the other parent or by the student’s other guardian, but whose parental rights have not been terminated.

• A parent who is incarcerated for an offense involving violence, and whose custodial rights have not been formally modified because they are in prison.

• A parent with a documented history of family violence in the home, known to the district through a custody dispute or a prior finding, but who retains full legal parental status.

• A parent who has had little or no relationship with the student for years and reappears to assert access rights under this rule, in a manner that can itself signal risk to the student.

• A student and custodial parent living in a family violence shelter, or a family operating under an active CPS safety plan that limits or supervises the other parent’s contact with the student.

• A student or family enrolled in Texas’s confidential address program for survivors of family violence, sexual assault, stalking, or trafficking, where disclosing location-identifying information to the other parent could endanger the family.

The rule’s definition of what counts as a “service” needing parental consent includes language covering any method “presented or characterized as a survey, check-in, or screening or is embedded in an academic lesson” that touches on a student’s attitudes, habits, beliefs, or feelings. Pair that with the rule’s opt-in requirement, and you get a genuinely strange result: read literally, a teacher, coach, counselor, or school nurse asking a student how they’re coping with a hard week could require prior written parental consent, the same as a formal psychological evaluation.

Although the Texas Legislature certainly wants TEA to implement SB 12, it did not direct TEA to maximize parental authority at the expense of every other interest the education system exists to protect, including students' interests. Those are two different instructions, and the proposed rule reads as if it is solely focused on parents.

Texas Has Already Had Problems Associated with This Approach

Texas didn’t have to imagine what happens when a rule like this is written too broadly. It found out in real time on this same bill.

The text of SB 12 reads that health care services cannot be provided without parental consent unless it is “necessary to further a compelling state interest, such as providing life-saving care to a child….”

Short of care to prevent death, the bill’s language requires parental consent, and it is nearly identical to language in other “parental rights” bills being promoted by groups like Moms for Liberty, ParentalRights.org, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and the Foundation for Government Accountability in Congress and in states across the country.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) made that clear in a proposed rule last August (days before the new school year began).

Consequently, within days of SB 12 taking effect on September 1, 2025, school nurses across the state were unsure whether they could hand a kid a Band-Aid, an ice pack, or any type of first aid without written parental consent on file.

It got so bad that the bill’s own authors, Rep. Jeff Leach and Sen. Brandon Creighton, wrote to Commissioner Mike Morath asking TEA to issue “clear and consistent guidance,” saying they expected schools “not to suspend common sense when it comes to providing basic care for the children at their schools.” They referred to it as “common sense.”

TEA put out emergency guidance in September 2025 clarifying that first aid didn’t require active consent. Subsection (q) of the newly proposed rule is essentially that fix, made permanent.

This history is about to repeat itself in the newly proposed rule but with different services. The same instinct that made a nurse hesitate over a Band-Aid last September is going to make school officials hesitate over asking a kid how they’re doing this coming school year, for exactly the same reason.

Unfortunately, the rule’s language is broad enough that the cautious, liability-conscious reading will win by default, and it may take a public outcry and emergency guidance to fix it after the fact.

This is what happened in Idaho after it passed its own parental consent law in 2024. That law produced identical confusion — school districts told parents that first aid and all other health services required parental consent. But in Idaho, the same broad language restricted those providing health care services to children in a manner that included the state’s 988 suicide crisis line.

Teenagers later testified to lawmakers that hotline responders had hung up on them mid-crisis because they couldn’t confirm parental consent in the moment. One student told the committee he knew a girl who’d been hung up on twelve separate times during twelve separate crises. Another described being minutes from a suicide attempt and said he still thinks about how that night might have gone differently if someone had simply stayed on the line.

It took Idaho two legislative sessions, hearings, press conferences, podcasts, and more to get legislators to admit on the record that their own law was “a mess” and to begin fixing it. Even with the passage of a recent cleanup bill, problems with the original bill remain unresolved.

Fortunately, after Texas received its first aid warning, the Lone Star State moved quickly to fix it. That’s to the state’s credit.

But TEA’s latest rule fails to close and, in fact, opens up new problems that should not require a viral story about a school official afraid to ask a kid how they’re doing, or worse, before it reaches something as serious as what Idaho went through. Texas children shouldn’t need a second scramble, or a repeat of what it took Idaho years and real harm to fix, to protect something so basic and — to use Leach’s and Creighton’s own words — “common sense.”

I don’t think most legislators pictured a teacher needing a permission slip to “check in” with a kid as to how they’re doing when they voted for SB 12. But that’s exactly what happens when a law is built around a single value and never stops to ask what it costs the kids who don’t fit the assumption underneath it.

Furthermore, rules don’t get read the way legislators likely imagined them in a hearing room, either. They get read by a school district’s lawyer trying to keep the district and its education professionals out of trouble, and when a rule is this broad and confusing, the safe answer for that lawyer is always going to be: don’t ask kids how they are doing. Don’t demonstrate concern, compassion, or even basic humanity.

Get the bureaucratic signed form first. When in doubt, stay quiet. Even if the parent has provided consent, educators can’t possibly know which parents have and have not, so the default will be to not “check in.”

That’s the part that should worry every parent, not just the ones who feel strongly about consent — the rule as written doesn’t clearly distinguish between a clinical intervention and a caring adult paying attention. And for the rest of you living outside Texas and Idaho, the “parental rights” bills being introduced and passed in states and by school boards across the country are doubling down on these problems.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds Like It Should

This debate also comes at exactly the wrong moment. Young people are facing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Survey, nearly 40% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and about one in five seriously considered attempting suicide.

At the same time, the CDC identifies school connectedness — the feeling that adults and peers at school care about you — as one of the strongest protective factors for adolescent mental health.

What actually keeps kids safe: adults who notice things. The teacher who clocks that a normally talkative kid has gone silent. The coach who sees a player pull away from the team. The counselor a kid trusts enough to say something is wrong before it becomes a crisis. That noticing never starts with a form. It starts with someone asking a few questions, because they were paying attention and they cared enough to ask.

If the rule makes staff hesitate — if it teaches them that a “check in” might expose them to discipline, a fine, or a licensing complaint — the predictable outcome is less noticing and less caring. Kids become more invisible and less safe. The people best positioned to catch a problem early stop asking the questions that would have caught it.

This isn’t only a child-safety argument. It’s also an education argument. Schools don’t just deliver academic content; they educate whole children, and a kid who’s scared, isolated, hungry, or in crisis cannot learn well no matter how good the lesson plan is. Trusted relationships between students and the adults at school aren’t a nice extra on top of the academic mission — they’re part of how the academic mission gets accomplished.

Schools have never been places where adults simply teach math or English. Teachers notice bruises. School nurses identify untreated asthma. Coaches recognize eating disorders. Counselors intervene before anxiety becomes crisis.

A rule that makes those relationships riskier to maintain doesn’t just put kids at risk. It undermines the very thing schools are there to do – to serve as caring adults supporting the education, growth, and development of the students in their care.

The Kids Most Likely to Fall Through

There’s another way this rule quietly pulls the caring adult out of a kid’s life, as it requires a parent to actively opt in before a student can receive certain health care services, such as counseling..

For some students, you can send the form home, get a parent to sign it, and be done. But think about which kids are most likely to have a form that never comes back: foster youth moving between placements, with no single parent consistently in the loop. Kids experiencing homelessness, doubled up with relatives or living out of a car, whose family has bigger problems than a school form that week. Kids in households where a parent is working two jobs and never sees the folder of school paperwork at the bottom of a backpack. Kids who live in arrangements that might include grandparents or other kinship where those adults don’t have the authority to sign and provide consent.

This is the reality of what life looks like for many children and families, and it describes many of the students research consistently shows are already the most likely to be falling behind and the ones most in need of having an adult in their lives – including teachers, counselors, coaches, and nurses in schools – “checking in” with them.

An opt-in requirement with no fallback doesn’t ask whether a service is a good idea for a specific kid. It just asks whether paperwork made it home and came back signed. When it doesn’t, the rule doesn’t pause and check in on that kid. It just quietly removes them from the list of kids allowed to get help.

That’s not a hypothetical about bad parents. It’s what happens to good kids in hard situations when a system is built to default to “no service” rather than “let’s make sure someone follows up.”

There are other places where this same instinct — treat every disclosure as something to manage, not something to hear — creates real danger. For example, the rule also requires staff to notify a parent within one school day of a student disclosing anything involving “sexual behaviors,” and it does not distinguish between two very different things: a student telling a counselor they’re gay, and a student telling a counselor an adult has touched them inappropriately.

One of those is a student sharing who they are. The other is a student who may be in danger. These are nowhere close to the same thing.

And yet, the rule treats both the same, which means the disclosure that most urgently needs fast action gets exactly the urgency it deserves, while a student’s own sense of who they are becomes something a school is required to report on a clock, whether or not it’s safe for that student’s family to know.

Leaning on the rule’s existing abuse-and-neglect exception isn’t enough of a fix, because that exception requires a staff member to predict and document that real abuse is likely before they’re allowed to protect a student — a student who reasonably fears rejection or being pushed out of the house, without a documented risk of physical abuse, gets no protection under that standard at all. A student’s control over their own personal information shouldn’t need to clear that bar. It’s the student’s information, experience, and life to begin with.

The rule’s list of disclosures requiring mandatory same-day parental notification puts a student getting a tattoo in the same sentence, under the same urgent reporting requirement, as a student disclosing suicidal ideation.

This language in the rule bears repeating: a piercing and a suicide risk, treated by the state as belonging to the same category of concern. That’s not a rule protecting kids. The rule doesn’t distinguish between a teenager making an ordinary adolescent choice about their own body and a teenager in crisis, and it asks school staff to treat both the same way. Not everything a student does or says needs to become a data point in a state-mandated report that weaponizes school personnel as snitches.

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re what happens when a rule is built around a single value — parental notification and consent — without building in the same safeguards that every other child-serving system already knows it needs, and without ever asking whether the thing being disclosed is actually the state’s business to report.

None of these problems are inevitable. TEA still has the opportunity and the responsibility to revise the rule before it becomes final.

What We’re Asking For

First Focus on Children filed formal comments with TEA this week.

We’re not asking the agency to abandon SB 12 or to pretend parents shouldn’t know what’s happening with their kids at school. We’re asking TEA to fix the parts of the rule that would sweep up the good with the bad:

• Make clear that routine, informal check-ins by educators aren’t the kind of “examination” this rule was meant to regulate.

• Build in a real fallback for students whose opt-in forms never come back, so a kid isn’t quietly cut off from support just because paperwork didn’t make it home.

• Stop treating disclosures about who a student is — their sexual orientation, gender identity, or relationships — the same as disclosures that signal a student is at risk, and stop requiring mandatory parental notification for the former.

• Drop tattoos and other ordinary body-autonomy choices from the list of disclosures that trigger mandatory reporting; that list should be reserved for genuine safety risks.

• Close the gap that lets a parent with a protective order against them, a history of family violence, or a violent incarceration still invoke full, unqualified access rights.

• Make sure a kid with asthma, diabetes, or epilepsy doesn’t lose access to daily medication because a form didn’t come back in time.

• Hold a listening tour so TEA hears directly from students across Texas before this rule is finalized. It’s their education and their schools. They should get a say before the rule governing their daily interactions with trusted adults is locked in.

File Your Own Comment: It Takes Five Minutes

TEA is required to read and consider every comment it receives, and the comment period closes Monday, July 27.

You don’t need to write eight pages as we did. A few sentences saying which part of this rule concerns you, in your own words, is important, and it counts more than you’d think — agencies notice when the same concern shows up in dozens of independent comments, not just one organization’s letter.

• Submit online: through TEA’s proposed commissioner rules comment form.

• Submit by email: rules@tea.texas.gov.

• What to say, if you want a starting point: pick whichever piece of this landed for you — the permission slip for an educator’s check-in, the outing risk, the tattoo-versus-suicide-risk list, the gap for kids with a dangerous parent, the kids who fall through an opt-in form that never comes back — and just say why it worries you. You’re welcome to borrow language straight from this post or from our full letter.

If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, counselor, school nurse, school administrator, or a student yourself, your comment carries particular weight, because you’re the one this rule will actually land on. TEA needs to hear from the people who ask kids how they’re doing every day, not just from advocacy groups.

This Isn’t Just a Texas Story

Texas isn’t alone in this.

Over the past few years, a wave of states have passed some version of a “parents’ bill of rights,” and they share more than a label. They share a design choice: treat parental authority as close to absolute, and treat a child’s independent interests — education, health, development, safety, privacy, well-being, and dignity — as an afterthought.

Children become invisible when a law is written around parents as a category and a slogan, instead of around the actual range of kids and families a school serves — including the kid whose home isn’t safe, the kid whose parent can’t be reached, and the kid who just needed one adult at school to pay attention without a form standing in the way.

Kids are not their parents’ property, and their well-being is not automatically identical to their parents’ preferences. Most of the time the two align. However, when they don’t, a law that never planned for that gap doesn’t stay neutral — it comes down on the side of the parent, every time, by default, because that’s the only case it was built to handle.

Texas is where this particular rule happens to be up for public comment right now, but the same gap is baked into similar laws in other states, and it will keep producing the same results until legislatures start treating children as people the law owes something to directly, not just as extensions of whoever has custody of them.

The One Question: “Is It Good for the Children?”

Every piece of federal or state policy affecting children deserves one question: “Is it good for children?”

We should never build a school system where compassion requires paperwork or where caring adults need a permission slip to be human. A rule that makes a teacher, counselor, coach, school nurse, or athletic trainer think twice before asking a struggling kid how they’re doing does not pass that test.

Children deserve schools where trusted adults can notice when something is wrong, ask caring questions, provide appropriate support, and protect students from harm, all while respecting parents’ legitimate role in their upbringing. That’s not a contradiction. It’s what a rule that actually works would look like. TEA should revise this one so it advances that shared goal instead of undermining it.

The comment period on this rule runs through July 27. If you work in a Texas school, or you’re a parent who wants your kid’s teacher to feel free to ask how they’re doing, TEA needs to hear from you too.

And if you’re reading this from another state where a similar bill is moving, or has already passed, don’t wait for a rulemaking to say something — the earlier protections for children get built in, the fewer kids fall through before anyone notices.

Kids can’t wait.