Jessica Bruha reports on another lawsuit seeking records that a university says are protected by FERPA, the federal privacy law protecting education records: “The lawsuit is the last thing we wanted to do. If they said they would give us the records now, we would settle out of court. I’d drop the lawsuit.” Those were…
Category: Youth & Schools
Ottawa Citizen wins fight for student grade records from Carleton university
Glen McGregor reports: Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner has ordered Carleton University to hand over 12 years of student grade records to the Ottawa Citizen. The Citizen filed a Freedom of Information request in 2011 seeking “anonymized” grade data — without names or student numbers attached — but Carleton refused to release them, arguing that…
New Jersey schools must warn students, families if “Big Brother” is watching
John Mooney reports: The provocatively named Anti-Big Brother Act arose out of a situation in Pennsylvania in which a school district was accused of spying on students through their school-issued laptops, including taking literally thousands of pictures. New Jersey legislators seeking to prevent such incidents here passed the new law this past spring. It requires districts to…
Texas School District Drops Embattled RFID Student IDs; Opts For Tons Of Cameras Instead
Tim Cushing reports: The Northside Independent School District (NISD) of Texas, best known for being sued by a student over its mandatory RFID card policy, is dropping the technology that originally landed it in the courtroom. These chipped student ID cards were deployed to track students in hopes of bumping up the district’s attendance numbers — thus…