The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to forbid Ohio State and Miami University from publicly releasing their student disciplinary records on June 27.
The decision confirmed that student disciplinary records are confidential under a federal law.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a national weekly newspaper, appealed to the court Aug. 21, 2001, seeking access to MU and OSU student disciplinary records.
The U.S. Department of Education won a lawsuit in a district court seeking an injunction against the two universities to stop them from disclosing the records.
The appeals court affirmed the decision of the district court that students’ documents are protected under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.
“The recent decision by the federal appellate court confirmed a long-standing Ohio State policy that students disciplinary records are confidential,” said Christopher M. Culley, deputy general counsel and the spokesman for OSU.
Culley said the case involved a conflict between a federal statute, the FERPA and the Ohio Public Records Act that requires records maintained by any state entity to be open and available to the public.
The FERPA is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. This law is applicable to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the DOE, according to their Web site.
“The students can continue to be assured that their education records will be protected under the FERPA,” said James B. Bradshaw, the spokesman for the DOE.
Bradshaw said the ruling meant student education records, especially disciplinary records, would generally not be released without the written consent of the student.
Holly Wissing, a spokeswoman for MU, said the decision on the appeal case clarified an ambiguous situation for all universities in the nation.
“We would be as open as we can be in protecting the students as required by the law,” Wissing said.
Culley said OSU and other universities now have clarification with regard to the interplay between state public records law and the protections afforded a student disciplinary record under the federal law.
Scott Jaschik, editor of the Chronicle, said they are disappointed at the appeals court’s decision.
“There will be lesser information available to determine whether the campus judicial systems work well,” he said.
Jaschik said the intended use of students’ disciplinary records was to write an article about how judicial systems work in the universities.
“We will not reveal students’ information in the article,” he said.
The Chronicle requested the disciplinary records for the calendar years 1995 and 1996 from MU and OSU in December 1997 and January 1998, U.S. Circuit Judge Karl Forester said in the ruling.
“We were about to release the students’ disciplinary records when we received the court order not to release any documents,” Wissing said.
Culley said the universities were bound to follow an order the Ohio Supreme Court decided in an earlier case – which required universities to disclose disciplinary records – before OSU received the court order.
Forester said the Ohio Supreme Court erred in including disciplinary records as documents falling in the Ohio Public Act.
“Some records were collected but only one month’s record from 1995 to1996 period were actually produced,” Culley said.
He saidthe DOE filed a lawsuit in federal district court to stop the release of the documents and the federal court ordered that no records were to be released while the lawsuit was in process.
The federal court ruled the FERPA applied to the lawsuit and students’ disciplinary records were refrained from releasing publicly. The appeals court upheld the federal court’s decision, Forester said in the ruling.
Bradshaw said the DOE implemented some measures to remind all universities of the FERPA after the ruling.
“We have incorporated (FERPA) into the compliance training that we conduct for postsecondary institutions.”
“The importance of this ruling is that the court upheld in strong and forceful language our historic interpretation of the act as it relates to disciplinary records,” he said.
Jaschik said they have no intention to further pursue the case.
The case originated with a lawsuit in 1995 when MU’s student newspaper, The Miami Student, filed a written request under the Ohio Public Records Act to seek student disciplinary records from the university. In that lawsuit, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled against MU and concluded university disciplinary records were not education records protected under the FERPA, Forester said in the ruling.
After the DOE learned about the universities’ intention in complying with the paper’s request, it filed complaints immediately to stop the records from being released.
