When student journalists at James Madison University pressed administrators for dorm-by-dorm data on Covid-19 cases last year, their requests were initially rebuffed. They later revealed that the data didn’t exist.
During a hearing on Thursday in a Virginia courtroom, the public university’s lawyer said James Madison wasn’t tracking positive cases per dorm before a fall-2020 outbreak, in which the campus’s positivity rate reached 60 percent. The revelation came in response to a lawsuit filed by Jake Conley, editor in chief of James Madison’s student newspaper, The Breeze. Conley has represented himself in the suit.
Following the surge in cases, James Madison began to record Covid cases per dorm, but did not publish that information on its online Covid dashboard. The university instead offered to give The Breeze the data on Covid cases per dorm with a 30-day delay. The newspaper’s requests for the number of positive cases per dorm from August 17 to September 16, 2020 — when case numbers were soaring — were denied.
In an affidavit filed as part of the university’s response to the lawsuit, the director of its Office of Residence Life said that students living in dorms had been notified of positive tests by phone, and the results had been noted in students’ individual education records during that time, The Harrisonburg Citizen reported.
“As we continued to learn and adapt, the university started compiling data in a new and better way,” said Mary-Hope Vass, a university spokesperson in an interview with The Chronicle. “While we did not have a certain record because it did not exist, the information was still being monitored.”
The university has always tracked Covid-related data, including the numbers of cases per dorm, but it did not keep a record of the data until after the spike, Vass said.
For Conley, it was important that students knew the number of positive cases in each dorm so that they could make informed decisions. He said students may behave differently if they know that positive cases have been found in their dorm, as opposed to the general James Madison community. He said the proposed 30-day delay in releasing the Covid data would have made it much less useful.
“Without accurate and detailed information, it’s very hard for people to make informed public-health decisions for themselves, especially in the middle of the worst health crisis this country and world has seen in how long,” Conley said.
The university had previously denied the student newspaper’s open-records requests for the Covid data per dorm, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal law on health-care privacy, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law on the privacy of students’ education records. Vass said the 30-day delay would protect students’ privacy.
Experts have previously told The Chronicle that colleges and universities are allowed to disclose Covid case numbers as long as they can’t lead a “reasonable person” to figure out the identities of students who have tested positive.
James Madison’s Covid dashboard now includes the number of positive cases reported by the university health center and the number of self-reported positive cases. It also shows the percentage of students who are either partly or fully vaccinated.
The lawsuit is continuing. Judge Bruce Albertson, of the Circuit Court of Rockingham County, said on Thursday he would review the evidence. He has 15 days to issue a ruling on whether the university should shorten its suggested time frame for providing the number of positive Covid cases per dorm to The Breeze.