I wish every local community had the kind of detailed reporting on student privacy issues that Melinda J. Overstreet provides in her coverage of a change in Glasgow Independent Schools’ policies. From the newly drafted policies: “In the school environment, a search is permissible where a school official has reasonable grounds, a ‘suspicion,’ based upon…
Category: Youth & Schools
Massachusetts DESE finds Tewksbury breach violated state law
In April, this site noted what I described as a “horrific” breach involving the Tewksbury public schools. A document included in a 222-page School Committee packet that had been publicly available online not only exposed personal and private details for the out of district placements of 83 special education students, but it rated their parents according to their “cooperativeness”…
American students are given threat assessments
At what point will we say, “Enough, already!” ? Joe Cadillic writes: Schools and police are using V-STAG to assess a students threat level: “The Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines (V-STAG) is a school-based manualized process designed to help school administrators, mental health staff, and law enforcement officers assess and respond to threat incidents involving students in kindergarten through…
FERPA, Video Surveillance, and Law Enforcement Units
Bill Fitzgerald writes: In this post, we will take a look at what is potentially a large loophole in FERPA that has some obvious implications for school to prison pipeline issues. However, I need to open with an enormous caveat. First, the FERPA brochure referenced in this post is from 2007. It is possible that these…