June 8, 1999; School District 273 (Edina)
6/8/1999 10:14:43 AM
This is an opinion of the Commissioner of Administration issued pursuant to section 13.072 of Minnesota Statutes, Chapter 13 - the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act. It is based on the facts and information available to the Commissioner as described below.
Facts and Procedural History:For purposes of simplification, the information presented by the person who requested this opinion and the response from the government entity with which the person disagrees are presented in summary form. Copies of the complete submissions are on file at the offices of IPA and, except for any data classified as not public, are available for public access. On February 18, 1999, IPA received a letter dated February 10, 1999, from the Ws, a married couple. In their letter, the Ws asked the Commissioner to issue an advisory opinion about their and their children's rights regarding certain data maintained by School District 273, Edina. The Ws' request required clarification and additional information. The Ws raised several issues in their request; the Commissioner agreed to address three of them in this opinion. IPA, on behalf of the Commissioner, wrote to Kenneth Dragseth, Superintendent of the District, in response to the Ws' request. The purposes of this letter, dated April 23, 1999, were to inform him of the Ws' request and to ask him to provide information or support for the District's position. On May 13, 1999, IPA received comments, dated May 12, 1999, from Ann Goering, an attorney representing the District. A summary of the facts is as follows. The Ws' children, X and Y, attend school in the District. Accordingly, the District maintains data, most of which are private, about the Ws and X and Y. Over the past several years, the Ws and the District have been involved in a number of disputes. Some of the disputes involved one of Y's former teachers. In October of 1995, the aforementioned teacher filed in district court for a restraining order against one of the Ws. As a result, additional documents were filed in court and there was a hearing. Later, in April of 1996, the same teacher filed in district court a lawsuit against the Ws, the District, and the teacher's labor union. Whether or not the court filings are public is determined by court-established rules. In this case, the Commissioner knows that many of the court filings are public record; his representative has inspected them. (See Rule 4, Rules of Public Access to Records of the Judicial Branch.) In 1997 and 1999, two newspaper articles were published which contained information about the Ws and their children. The Ws requested an advisory opinion alleging that the District had released private educational data to the public which then ended up in the articles. The Ws also alleged that District employees had disseminated private data about one of their children to persons within the District who had no need to know of that specific information Issues:In their request for an opinion, the Ws asked the Commissioner to address the following issues:
Discussion:Data about students and their parents are classified at Minnesota Statutes Section 13.32. Subject to limited exceptions, educational data are private and not accessible to the public. The background giving rise to this opinion is as follows. The teacher, the teacher's union, the Ws, and the District all filed documents in court which contain detailed information about the Ws, X, and Y, and their disputes with the District. Once these documents were filed, pursuant to court rules, many, if not all, of them became part of the public court record and are accessible to anyone. (The Commissioner cannot say for certain whether all of the documents filed in court are part of the public record. However, for purposes of this opinion, it is important only that the documents that are public contain substantial amounts of detail regarding the situation.) Regarding the first two issues of this opinion, the Ws alleged that the District violated their rights and the rights of X and Y when the "data was published in [each of the two articles]." The Ws asserted that the reporters who wrote the articles could not have obtained the information from any public documents. They wrote, "There are no public documents...from which [these articles] could have been written." However, as part of the District's response, Ms. Goering wrote that other than any public directory information (see section 13.32, subdivision 5), "No other information about the students was released to the public outside of the Court system..." Attached to her response were copies of filings relating to the restraining order and one of the filings relating to the civil law suit. Of the civil suit, she wrote, "Enclosed please find a listing of the court filings...which the Department of Administration may review at the Hennepin County Government Center, but which are too voluminous to be reproduced here." She added, "These documents include numerous affidavits and memoranda containing detailed factual allegations." Representatives of the Commissioner reviewed the newspaper articles, the court documents that Ms. Goering submitted, and additional court documents (roughly six inches of paper) that Ms. Goering referred to in her response. The articles contain substantial amounts of detail about the Ws' disputes with the District. The Ws are mentioned by name and although their children are not, they are described in such a way that they could be identified. The court files consist of numerous documents, many of which contain highly detailed descriptions of the relationship between the teacher and the Ws and also information about Y and X. In addition, the incidents leading up to the various legal battles are depicted in great detail. Upon comparing the data contained in the newspaper articles to the data in the public court filings, it is possible the reporters obtained some of the information by reading the court documents. However, there is no way for the Commissioner to determine, with absolute certainty, from where the data published in the articles originated, be it public court records, school district personnel, or other members of the public, e.g, other students or parents. Therefore, the Commissioner can conclude only that if any of the data in the newspaper articles came directly from interviews/discussions with district personnel, and those personnel released private educational data about the Ws and their children, the Ws' rights were violated. If however, the articles were based solely on information obtained from the public court records, the Ws' rights have not been violated. In the third issue, the Ws alleged that a District middle school teacher disseminated, without consent, several documents containing private educational data about X and the Ws to an elementary school teacher. The elementary school teacher then disseminated the information to his/her school principal. The Ws objected to this dissemination because X was a middle school student, not an elementary school student. Both state and federal law set forth standards regarding access to private data by employees of a school district. Minnesota Rules section 1205.0400 states that private data may be disseminated to those persons within the entity, e.g., the District, whose work assignments reasonably require access to the private data. 34 CFR 99.31(a)(1), of the rules implementing the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), provides that education records may be disclosed to other school officials, including teachers, within the institution whom the institution has determined to have a legitimate educational interest in the record. Furthermore, 34 CFR 99.7(a)(3)(iii) states that if a District has a policy of disclosing records under 99.31(a)(1), the district must include in its annual notification to parents a specification of criteria for determining who constitutes a school official and what constitutes a legitimate educational interest. In the case of this opinion, the District did not provide the Commissioner with any information as to how the District, in its policies and procedures, makes decisions and guides its employees on how to make those determinations. Therefore, it is not possible for the Commissioner to say definitively whether the elementary school teacher and/or his/her principal needed the data in question to perform their work responsibilities or whether they had a legitimate educational interest in obtaining the data. The Commissioner does not know the District's position on this issue because Ms. Goering did not address it in her response. The Commissioner does know that the District should have provided detailed guidance to its employees on issues of access to educational data. (See federal rules cited above.) The District's failure to provide a copy of the federally required specifications raises the possibility that the District has not met its obligation under federal law. However, without further information, the Commissioner cannot make a definite determination. Opinion:Based on the facts and information provided, my opinion on the issues raised by the Ws is as follows:
Signed: David F. Fisher
Dated: June 8, 1999 |
Educational data
Court records (See also: Judicial branch)
Legitimate educational interest
