The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) guides how and when educational institutions may or must share student education records. Basic FERPA training can help staff become familiar with the broad principles of the law, identify when there may be a FERPA issue, and know their professional responsibilities. However, FERPA comes into play in specific circumstances that require a more detailed and nuanced understanding. These specific circumstances spurred the proposal to provide a FERPA 2.0 workshop at this year’s annual meeting.
A focused look at FERPA
“Sometimes, general FERPA training hits its limit of usefulness,” said Allyson Dean, at Oregon State University (OSU). “In addition, although it differs by campus, many institutions don’t have a renewal process for FERPA training. So if someone came to the institution ten years ago and passed the test, they don’t necessarily have to revisit the law in an assessment-based way.”
Beyond ‘it depends’
“Ninety percent of the time, the answer to a FERPA question is ‘it depends,’” said Rebecca Mathern, OSU Registrar. “That will often be the case for colleagues with light FERPA training and without day-to-day exposure. But so many of us in the registrar and admissions field can move past ‘it depends’ with a deeper look at these specific topics.”
An approach OSU has taken in order to move beyond the ‘it depends’ phase of knowledge has been the coordination of “FERPA learning communities” to engage relevant staff members in investigative learning around FERPA as it pertains to their roles on campus. From these learning communities and FERPA conversations with colleagues throughout the years, Dean, Rebecca Mathern, OSU Registrar, and Tina Falkner, Director of Student Finance at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, developed a workshop that will discuss nuanced FERPA issues pertaining to:
- Medical and counseling records.
- Institutional review board processes with human subjects data.
- Card-swipe data.
- Data requests: internal, external, for assessment purposes, for research.
- Electronic signatures.
- Legal requests.
- Title IX.
Dean, Mathern, and Falkner will share proposed strategies to addressing these nuanced situations, as well as tips for training staff and a discussion of records retention rules, at an upcoming half-day FERPA workshop in April.
“In those topic areas, our goal is to get specific and draw some clear connections so people can walk through the questions and come up with points of clarity, so they understand what causes everyone to draw same conclusions,” Mathern said. “Then we’ll take those points of clarity to develop talking points we can use to answer questions, instead of saying ‘it depends.’”
The Sunday afternoon workshop ($250) will be held just prior to the AACRAO Annual Meeting, April 2-5, 2017, in Minneapolis. Learn more and register for FERPA 2.0.