The TeenScreen case: screening, consent, and the courts

2004 — decided 5 August 2008

The system's one modern court fight was over a questionnaire: TeenScreen, a Columbia University adolescent mental-health screening program, came to St. Joseph County schools in 2004 as a suicide-prevention measure, instituted after a student at Penn High School took his own life; Madison Center — through its children's arm, the Madison Center for Children — supplied the screeners. On 7 December 2004 a fifteen-year-old Penn sophomore was given the screening's yes-or-no questionnaire by Madison Center personnel and told, on its results, that she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and social anxiety disorder. Her parents said they had never received the notification letter and had given no consent; the program ran on passive consent, an opt-out form rather than a signed permission. The episode is printed here at the boundary it sits on: Penn High School stands in Mishawaka, in the Penn-Harris-Madison district, and the family lived in Osceola; the institution whose conduct was sued over is this city's, and the case is Madison Center's documented reform episode.

The sequence in the public record is plain. In February 2005, after parents organized, the Penn-Harris-Madison superintendent recommended the program be suspended, and it was not used there again. In September 2005 the family sued the school corporation and Madison Center, Inc. in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, charging violations of parental rights and privacy under federal and state law. Judge James T. Moody's rulings mark the case's course: in 2006 the court dismissed the counts it held to sound in medical malpractice — the negligence-in-communicating counts, which Indiana law routes first to a medical review panel — and let the consent and privacy claims proceed; on 5 August 2008 the court granted the defendants summary judgment on the constitutional claims, holding that a voluntary, confidential school health screening, assented to by the student, did not violate the parents' substantive due process rights, and that the Indiana statutes cited created no private cause of action. The screening model the case tested — universal, opt-out, school-based — ended in this county's largest district by the district's own decision in 2005, three years before the court's vindication of its legality; both facts stand in the record, and this entry prints both.

Sources:

1. Rhoades v. Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation, United States District Court, Northern District of Indiana — the 2006 ruling on Madison Center's motion to dismiss (malpractice counts dismissed; consent and privacy counts proceeding) and the decision of 5 August 2008 granting summary judgment on the constitutional claims, each as summarized in the published case summaries of the court's opinions (Judge Moody).
2. The Rutherford Institute, case accounts (2005–2008) — the screening of 7 December 2004 by Madison Center for Children personnel, the program's 2004 institution following a Penn student's suicide, the passive-consent mechanism, the September 2005 filing, and the district's non-use of the program thereafter; the superintendent's February 2005 suspension recommendation as reported in the South Bend Tribune and carried in the case's contemporary coverage.