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2004–2008 · United States District Court, Northern District of Indiana — this county's own case
The screening case the row asks for is not a national case tested against a local equivalent; it is this county's case, arising in the school district that serves this ground. Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation is the district of Harris Township — of Granger's own schoolchildren — and its Penn High School stands in Mishawaka. In 2004 the district instituted TeenScreen, Columbia University's mental-health screening programme, at several St. Joseph County schools as a suicide-prevention measure; the screening itself was administered by personnel of the Madison Center for Children — the designated centre of the earlier articles. On December 7, 2004, Chelsea Rhoades, a 15-year-old Penn sophomore, was given the TeenScreen examination at school and told on its results that she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and social anxiety disorder. Her parents, Teresa and Michael Rhoades, said they had never been told and never consented — the notification letter, they said, never reached them — and in September 2005, represented by the Rutherford Institute, they sued the school corporation and Madison Center in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, charging violations of their constitutional rights to family integrity and privacy, of the federal Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, and of Indiana's consent statutes. The case is printed here from the court and press record only.
The holdings come in two dated rulings, and both are stated. In 2006, Judge James T. Moody ruled on Madison Center's motion to dismiss, which had argued that the whole case was medical malpractice requiring prior review under Indiana's Medical Malpractice Act: the motion was granted in part and denied in part — the counts alleging negligence in communicating the diagnosis and intentional infliction of emotional distress were dismissed as malpractice-rooted, but the counts alleging violations of the statutory consent requirements and of the family's privacy rights were held not to be medical-malpractice claims at all, and proceeded. In August 2008 the court ruled again, refusing to end the case on the school corporation's motion and sending the constitutional claims toward trial: the rulings, as the contemporary press and the family's counsel recorded them, upheld the claims that the district had deprived the family of its federal constitutional rights to family integrity and privacy, the court unimpressed by the signed student forms — in the summary of the ruling carried in the March 2009 commentary on the case, "the students simply signed the form because they were told to do so, and did not understand that they had a choice." TeenScreen itself did not survive its decade: the programme moved to active parental consent in 2006 and closed in 2012, and P-H-M's spokeswoman confirmed in 2008 that the screening was "no longer practiced there." The case's final disposition — verdict or settlement after the August 2008 ruling set it for trial — is a named gap of this section: no open source reached prints it, and the settling source is the district court's own docket in Rhoades v. Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation (N.D. Ind., filed September 2005), on PACER. What the record does establish, and what this row requires, is the holding the case is cited for: a school district that screens a child for mental illness without genuine parental consent answers for it in federal court, and the consent and privacy claims are the family's to bring — decided not in some other county's equivalent, but in the district that schools this ground.
Sources: Rhoades v. Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation, U.S. District Court, N.D. Ind. (2006) (the malpractice-act ruling, granted in part and denied in part, Moody, J.), as summarised in the case record; BMJ 2005;331:714 (the filing, the December 2004 screening, the diagnoses communicated); The Rutherford Institute, August 6, 2008 (the 2008 ruling and its terms; the December 7, 2004 date; Madison Center for Children as the screening body); South Bend Tribune, August 2008, via The Rutherford Institute (the trial ruling; TeenScreen at several St. Joseph County schools from 2004; P-H-M's confirmation the programme had ended there); Phyllis Schlafly commentary, March 2009 (the ruling's consent reasoning, as characterised); Hampson, "Screened Without Consent" (TeenScreen's 2006 move to active consent and its 2012 closure).