This petition was established by concerned parents and citizens living within the Hillsboro, MO R-III school district with the sole purpose of gathering support in an effort to encourage the Hillsboro R-III school board to sign a resolution to stop and reevaluate the implementation of Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) for the following reasons.

1. CCSSI was never approved by Congress but was included in the "four assurances" required of governors to sign to apply for the State Fiscal Stabilization and Reinvestment Act and the Race to the Top grants funded by the American Reinvestment Act.

2. CCSSI was never evaluated by Missouri Legislators, they were bypassed.

3. CCSSI was presented as an enticement for the wavier of "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" funds. Since "No Child Left Behind" required an unrealistic goal of 100% proficiency by 2014, a waiver was a must or suffer loss of accreditation.

4. CCSSI are copyrighted to non-government trade organizations. We have concerns regarding access to additional information and the cost of such information.

5. Individual school districts are committed to paying unknown costs associated with implementing Common Core assessment plans, and purchase of materials, of which tax payers and their elected representatives never had any input. This implies taxation without representation.

6.CCSSI, which requires a large amount of data collection on students as well as teachers, could lead to unauthorized sale or sharing of personal data to commercial sources. Although, it hasn't presented a problem to date, MO has no formal restrictions on DESE from populating data systems designed according to the National Data Model of over 400 data points including non-education related information such as religion, voting history, biometric data, etc.

7. The Department of Education Organizational Act of 1979; the General Education Provision Act and the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 that was amended by No Child Left Behind of 2001 each prohibits the Federal Department of Education from involvement in developing, supervising, or controlling instructional materials or curriculum (Federal Law 20 USC 1232a. and The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Pub.L. 89-10, 79 Stat. 27, 20 US.C. ch. 70), CCSSI and the Smarted Balanced Assessment Consortium assessment tests coming in 2014 were funded, incentivized, and will be controlled under the direction of the Federal Department of Education. This is an overreach of the Federal Government into the state's educational system.

8. There is no evidence that Missouri State Statutes160.526.2; 160.518; 161.122; 168.191; or 160.514 were followed.