I suppose I should no longer be shocked when I read a news story about a controversy involving FERPA (the federal privacy law protecting students’ education records) in Oklahoma. After all, this was the state where sensitive and personal student information was made public if students appealed a state mandate. But now we have the same state fervently protecting…. parking tickets? Joey Stipek reports:
OU gave out almost 52,000 parking citations last year, then dismissed almost a third of them. But you won’t find out here whether athletes, student leaders, faculty or any other special interest group got special treatment. The reason? OU won’t release the records.
OU’s Open Records office and state and federal experts disagree whether student parking citations are exempt from a federal privacy law.
Read more on The Oklahoma Daily.
Frank LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center is quoted in the story, and explains why other states have (correctly, in my opinion) ruled that such tickets are not protected by FERPA.