Bob Schaffer: “This is a good amendment because at its core it empowers parents, and that really should be what we are all about here…”

“This is a good amendment because at its core it empowers parents, and that really should be what we are all about here in Congress, is finding ways to empower parents to the greatest extent possible. This empowers them through information and putting parents in the driver's seat when it comes to administering various psychological and psychiatric examinations, nonemergency medical examinations and tests that might be required at school. Giving parents the authority to make these decisions is just one strategy to do two things: one, to make parents a more integral part of the academic and learning experience of their children; but, secondly, to allow parents to be in a position where they have a better opportunity to protect their children from different examinations, procedures, different experiments that take place in America's government-owned schools that are somehow different than the academic mission that most parents assume these institutions are all about. That is, in fact, what these institutions should be about, and that should be our goal here in the House, is to focus to the greatest extent possible the mission of our public schools on the mission of teaching, on education. Pure and simple.”