Too Much Information

There is a lot of information that can help a teacher figure out how best to help a student learn.  Seemingly irrelevant data such as who the child lives with, what language (or languages) are spoken at home, and if the child has any medical issues are all clues a teacher can use tailor lessons to a child’s specific situation.  There’s one bit of information, however, that I simply can’t imagine anyone at a child’s school needing to know — but that didn’t stop one school district from asking for it.


Parents in the Dry Creek School District near Sacramento, California were surprised by one of the questions on the district’s enrollment application — they want to know if students were born vaginally or by c-section and, if the latter, why.  One mother of two was very much taken aback and has asked for an explanation to no avail.  “I really don’t feel think the school asking if the child was delivered vaginally or by C-Section is appropriate,” she told the local CBS affiliate.

Other parents have said they don’t think the district actually pays any attention to the question; one parent was said to have written “purple” as an answer and was never asked for an explanation.  Whether or not the district actually uses the information is beside the point; asking for it in the first place seems extremely inappropriate.  It matters not, in the long run, how a child was delivered — or even whether or not the child was adopted.  What matters is that the parents love and care for him and the teachers teach him.

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