Student Research Under Fire
DO FEDERAL OPT-OUT REGULATIONS APPLY TO YOUR STUDENTS ’ IN-SCHOOL SURVEYS ?
By Gary Clites
D o the students at your school use alcohol ? How much and how often ? Do they smoke ? Vape ? Have they cheated on a test this year , and if so , do they think that ’ s okay ? Are they excited when they look toward their opportunities in the future , or are they afraid ? There are many questions in journalism that can ’ t be answered by randomly interviewing a handful of students . They require well designed survey research to take the pulse of the school community to dig deep into the minds and lifestyles of the students our media serves .
Survey research is an important tool in journalism at any level , and it seems suddenly to have become an issue at schools across the country . I encountered the issue when my principal appeared at my door in October . My students were running a survey regarding student use of alcohol . He advised that I should pull back the survey due to federal opt-out rules that require that parents be given the option of disallowing their students to answer questions on certain sensitive subjects . I contacted the Student Press Law Center ( SPLC ) and began working with my students to develop a response ( they did complete the survey ).
A few weeks later at our state fall scholastic journalism event at the University of Maryland , two other teachers approached me stating that they had faced identical problems at their schools . Maryland ’ s New Voices student free press legislation had just gone into effect on October 1 , leading us to wonder whether the emergence of this issue was circumstantial or whether it was a roundabout effort to rein in a newly freed student press .
Then , the identical question emerged in repeated threads on the Journalism Education Association Listserv for journalism advisers . Teachers in other states were suddenly being challenged regarding optout regulations with regard to student-run surveys .
After some research , the SPLC determined that the relevant