Parents and committee spar after youth-risk survey given to opted-out middle school students

Parents packed the April 1 Burlington School Committee meeting to protest a youth risk behavior survey that several parents say was given to middle school students even though their parents had submitted opt-out forms.

The complaint reached the level of a public confrontation: multiple parents said students were told the survey was mandatory, that teachers did not honor opt-outs, and that some students were exposed to explicit question text and definitions that parents called inappropriate for sixth- through eighth-graders.

The parents’ concerns prompted a detailed response from Superintendent Dr. Anthony Conte. Conte said some opt-outs were lost in a large volume of ParentSquare communications and that school staff identified at least four concrete cases where an opt-out was not honored. He said the district had worked with a regional consortium and a public-health contractor (JSI) to convert a paper survey into a computer-based questionnaire and that JSI altered some definitions after the district’s wellness committee reviewed the survey. "The definitions were…