To the House Standing Committee on Education
Oppose HB 2099
February 13, 2015
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Barbara Saldivar, and I am the State Director of Concerned Women for America (CWA) of Kansas. CWA is the largest public policy women’s organization in the nation. Thank you for letting me address the issue of data collection on behalf of the CWA of Kansas members. We oppose HB 2099.
The law is that Parents must opt in their children for any surveys and data collected, and they must be shown copies of the data to be collected. Currently data is being collected under common core and by KIDS, Kansas Individual Data on Students, in addition to non-curricular surveys being administered by schools and numerous other agencies. Much of this data is behavioral, and judgments are being made about children.
This data collecting is costing the state a fortune. Why not ask for that contracted money back? How many Kansas agencies are funding education surveys? Following the money trail shows state dollars being used to hire outside service organizations, who then can hire lobbyists to keep the money flowing to survey children, enabling schools and other agencies to apply for even more grant money to “fix” the problems created by the original survey.
Expert testimony given last month in the House Education Committee by Paul Schwartz, Data Specialist, Olathe, and Brian Huesers, former Chief Information Officer, Kansas Department of Health and Environment, current Vice-president of Technology Information, Westlake Hardware told that our children’s data is the most highly sought information today, four times more valuable than data from the Department of Defense. Massive amounts of data are being collected on children in education, labor, and health records, often without having the necessary systems in place for protection.
The government is collecting massive amounts of data on all of us. It is time to “just say no” to data collection by opposing HB 2099.