Nearly 80 Florida nonprofit organizations and advocates are calling on the state Department of Education to reverse its unexplained decision to drop out of a CDC school-based survey that asks students about everything from their daily diet and exercise regimen to suicidal thoughts, sexual orientation and gender identity.
On Tuesday, 38 groups and 40 individuals signed a letter to Jacob Oliva, the Florida Department of Education’s interim commissioner, saying the survey — administered in Florida since 1991 — plays a “critical role” in helping kids struggling with mental illness, bullying, peer pressure and unhealthy lifestyles.
The groups included the Alliance for Public Schools, Disability Rights Florida, the Florida Psychological Association, the Florida Association of School Psychologists, the state’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Florida Education Association and the Florida Mental Health Advocacy Coalition, among others. Individuals included medical doctors, mental health professionals, nurse practitioners and advocates for students’ well-being.
The data is widely used by policy-makers and charitable foundations to determine where to invest money and resources.
Recent findings from the CDC survey, for instance, “clearly shows an epidemic related to the mental health needs of our students and that our schools are less safe now than they have been in the past decade,” said Rindala Alajaji, public policy associate at Equality Florida, the statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization. “We should be focused on supporting our students and creating safer schools, not hiding the data that is elevating these concerns.”
Formally known as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the confidential questionnaire from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conducted statewide in public high schools every other year. Its nearly 100 questions cover such topics as diet, exercise, smoking, self-image, bullying, drug-use, access to guns, use of birth control, sexual and physical abuse and eating disorders.
The survey also asks about students’ sexual orientation and gender identity, although in each case one of the multiple-choice answers is: “I do not know what this question is asking.”
Florida notified the CDC in mid-March that it was withdrawing its participation in the survey without explaining its decision nor publicly announcing the move. The Florida Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment then, nor did they respond when asked again Tuesday.
But in early May, a Department of Education spokesperson told the publication Education Week that the state planned to design its own behavior survey — a comment Oliva later repeated to the Tampa Bay Times.
“Rather than continue with a generic nationwide survey, our intent is to improve our data collection efforts to make the survey specifically tailored to Florida’s unique needs,” Cassie Palelis, the agency’s press secretary, wrote in an email to Education Week. She did not respond to the publication’s follow-up questions on who would design the survey or whether there were concerns over certain questions within the CDC survey, the article said.
Palelis did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
According to the nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute, which initially raised concerns over the state’s decision, the move not only costs valuable insight on teens’ well-being, but it also means the state will miss out on $100,000 in direct funding from the federal government to administer the survey.
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“It’s not a huge amount of money,” said Norín Dollard, a senior policy analyst at the institute and director of Florida KIDS COUNT, part of an annual assessment of child well-being in the United States. “But it really does not make sense financially or timewise [to develop a new survey]. The [CDC] survey already allows for the addition of local questions. … And a lot of work has to go into making a new survey so that it is valid and reliable. It takes time and testing, and that costs money.”
In addition, changing the survey now — amid a growing mental health crisis in young people — will “prevent us from seeing the real effects of the pandemic on our youth,” said Takeata King Pang, executive director of the Women’s Foundation of Florida.
Alison Yager, executive director of Florida Health Justice Project, called the survey “an essential and unique tool for understanding the health of youth in our state and around the country.” Without it, she added, it will be more difficult to measure whether intervention programs are working.
“Taking away this tool will hurt our youth,” she said.
Dollard said over 100 mental health and public health professionals have contacted her to express concerns about the state’s withdrawal.
As of Tuesday, the Florida Department of Health website continued to note that the CDC survey “provides school districts and their community partners with data that identify the most critical issues and needs of Florida’s public high school students.”
