An average student fills out three permission slips for a week’s worth of after-school activities. The next week the same student has four more forms to fill out, with one of them being the outdated permission form from last week. The student, without an updated permission slip, is turned away from the meeting because of a missed online parent signature.

During the first weeks of school, club sponsors and club board members had to wait two weeks to figure out the best way to follow the new Florida bill School-Sponsored Events and Activities. The bill did not clearly define how schools should carry out the new requirements, so Seminole County Public School created online permission forms that need to be filled out for every after-school activity: tutoring, club meetings, or field trips. 

These permission slips, however, are a major inconvenience. They can accumulate and become confusing, they are not very efficient, and they restrict students’ participation in their community. For many students, the permission forms themselves are hard to find, plus every student already has 30 plus forms to manage, an unnecessary addition to all the other responsibilities they have to juggle.

 On top of this, many parents do not care to fill the forms out themselves. Students, with or without their parent’s knowledge, can easily forge the digital signature. There is no way to trace the authenticity of forms being filled out by a parent, and although parents are sent an email to inform them that the forms were filled out in their name, a student can simply add their personal email to be sent that notification instead. It is absurd to rely on an inefficient online forms. If the true goal of the permission slips is to give back rights to the parents, shouldn’t there be permission forms that only parents can access? 

The concept of permission slips is contradictory to the thought that high school is a transition to adulthood. How are students expected to both act like grown-ups but at the same time have parents fill out a permission form so that they can participate in an after-school activity? How are we expected to transition to a life that is nurtured by community if we are restricted from participating in it by online forms that rarely even work? Sure, this bill wants to give rights to parents, but it seems to be taking away student rights in the process. Students who have participated in a school club like GSA for three years can now be denied from attending a meeting because of their parents’ beliefs, which can often be twisted by rumors and extremist opinions. With these new restrictions we are not allowing students to transition into adulthood, we are hiding them from it.

 The county needs to take a closer look at making this process better. We could simply have a form that allows students to participate in a certain club, we could have permission slips that can be filled out every semester, or have a schoolwide form that says students are able to participate in school activities with opt-out forms available for each event. That way, the minority who does not want to attend the event does not have to.

Seminole County has one of the strictest interpretations of the law in the state. And despite how anyone feels about the law, nobody can believe that our current model is how the law was intended. The district needs to find a better solution, one that is simplified and meaningful.

This story was originally published on Hagerty Journalism Today on September 27, 2023.