A U.S. congresswoman has asked the U.S. Education Department to clarify a provision of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as Ferpa, that may allow colleges to view and release students’ counseling records.
Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, on Wednesday wrote a letter to the department’s chief privacy officer, Kathleen M. Styles, seeking to clear up ambiguity surrounding the distinction between a student’s education records and his or her treatment records.
The letter appeared to have been prompted by a well-publicized case at the University of Oregon, where college officials retrieved the counseling records of a student in response to her lawsuit against it. The suit accuses the university of violating her civil rights after she was raped by three basketball players.
In a column for The Chronicle, Katie Rose Guest Pryal, a former law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argued that a provision of Ferpa allowed the university to see the woman’s treatment records. Some privacy experts have poked holes in her interpretation of the law, but others have said that private treatment records can become education records open to the university if they are part of litigation against the institution.
For its part, the department said in a statement last week that Ferpa allows colleges to see records like those in the Oregon case to defend themselves in litigation, as long as such steps are not prohibited by state law. But it also warned that it is “critically important to the department that all higher-education institutions ensure safe, nondiscriminatory learning environments that are free from harassment and sexual violence for our students. Any attempt to intimidate individuals who raise or support complaints about sexual violence would raise serious concerns of retaliation.”
