Due Process and Parental Right: Children's Future (Essay Sample)

Due Process and Parental Right
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Institutional Affiliation
Due Process and Parental Right
The signing of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007 gave a new impetus on the Rights of children. Among the beneficiaries were disabled children and those with special needs. This Convention included clauses that recognized the dignity of the beneficiaries with the primary aim of promoting their self-reliance and facilitation of active participation in the community. Prior experience routinely denied these children access to opportunities where they were perpetually condemned to isolations. Consequently, disabled persons’ organizations have seen success towards advocating for educational reformsCITATION Cen07 \l 1033 (Innocenti Research Centre, 2007). Such initiatives have spread to the review of legal aspects that touch on the rights of children.
In the educational arena, various debates have emerged over the years concerning the rights and privileges of the disabled learners in their educational engagements. Before the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, institutional administrators made educational policy decision matters that had far-reaching impacts on the disabled children with no requisition for the input of the concerned parents. The Act was without any checks and balances for Due Process rights. As such, the parent was a non-partisan in matters that affected his or her child. That meant that the parent had no right to be involved, nor be notified on educational matters discussing his or her child’s progress. Reforms in this sector have seen the introduction of Due Process courtesy of the enactment of Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA). Following this, we shall look at the meaning of due process and all that it involves, especially regarding parental rights over his or her child.
The legal free dictionary gives the following definition of the Due Process:
Due Process is a fundamental, constitutional guarantee that all legal proceedings shall be fair, and that one will be given notice of the proceedings and an opportunity to be heard before the government acts to take away one’s life, liberty, or property.
Following this is, therefore, a constitutional assurance that a law shall not be unreasonable, nor arbitrary or capricious. As such, the constitution grants that a person will not, unfairly or arbitrarily, be denied or deprived of his or her basic constitutional rights to life CITATION THE16 \l 1033 (FAREX). Ratifications of the Fourteenth Amendment of Due Process Clause further limited the powers of a State in regards to the rights and liberty of an individual. Due process therefore assumes or guarantees the protection of the Bill of Rights.
Depending on the degree of disability, some disabled children are so incapacitated that they cannot realize the impact of educational policies made on their behalf. Still, some of these children are minor thus incapable of deciding for themselves. It would, therefore, be prudent enough to entrust the protection of their rights on a trusted adult. After this viewpoint, it would mean that the closest and special person who would seek redress against the violation of the child’s rights is the parent, who is also the first guardian. It is the parent who suffers when educational institutions make decisions that would impact negatively the child’s life. IDEA thus grants the parents the right to prior notifications of meetings that are to discuss the child’s educational progress. Such meetings should be brought to the parent’s attention early enough to enable him or her to prepare for attendance. Cases of impropriety have however arisen resulting to litigations. Depending on the circumstances surrounding the case, courts have been case-specific on issues touching parental notifications, therefore questioning the credibility and application of Due Process. To illustrate on this, we shall use a case example of a past litigation to examine the topic of Due Process as applied to parental rights.
The case we shall use is that of Fields Vs Palmdale School District CITATION Par16 \l 1033 (ParentalRights.Org). According to it:
The Palmdale School District conducted a survey regarding “psychological barriers to learning,” which included questions of a sexual nature, asked of elementary school children. When parents learned that their children had received this questionnaire, they sued the district for the right “to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex.
In this case, when the parents came to know that their children had been questioned about the frequency of “thinking about having sex” and “thinking about touching other peoples’ private parts,” they brought an action that had both federal and state claims. The plaintiffs, in this case, were James Fields;Tammany Fields; Stuart Haberman; Robert Hoaglin; Kathie Hoaglin and Vanessa Shetler, while t...