By Frank LoMonteWhen a deadly or life-threatening crime takes place at an educational institution, the public justifiably asks: Did the school do enough to maintain safety? At such times, “we can’t say anything because of student privacy” is a profoundly incorrect answer—legally, morally, and practically.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was enacted in 1974 to protect students against law enforcement snooping into secret files their schools might be keeping without their knowledge. Over the years, aggressive lawyering by school and college attorneys has distorted the statute to encompass much more—but not nearly as much as school administrators insist.
Journalists and concerned parents have been unable to obtain many documents from the Broward County school system that might help the public understand whether school authorities responded to the Parkland, Fla., mass shooter’s capacity for violence with adequate urgency. Instead, they have met the “FERPA wall of secrecy” in asking about the background of Nikolas Cruz.
Government records, including those maintained by public schools, are normally presumed to be open for public inspection, even when the records contain sensitive or embarrassing information. But schools have widely come to misunderstand FERPA as preventing them from providing the public even with an anonymized factual description of serious disciplinary incidents or safety problems that involve students.
As a result, parents and community members regularly hear that “something bad happened” at a school but that they can’t be told what it is or whether anyone was punished. This makes it impossible for the public to hold schools and colleges accountable for how they use their governmental authority…
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