Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
The Five-Year Party (20 page)
When parents like Jay Wren run up against FERPA, few of them understand what a paper tiger it is. What Jay Wren did not know was that FERPA does not apply to the kinds of student disciplinary records he was seeking. This has been made clear by Congress, the Department of Education, and court rulings. When parents call, administrators are free to discuss student disciplinary actions with them. Party schools, however, have insisted on their own broad and clearly incorrect interpretation in order to keep those outside the college from prying too deeply into the inconvenient truths about what goes on at party schools. KU also didn’t tell Jay Wren that he could have had Jason sign a release form that would have allowed Jay access to the records he sought. KU didn’t tell Jay Wren that FERPA has such a low priority at the U.S. Department of Education that it has never been enforced, not once, in forty-five years.
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In May 2009, a Columbus, Ohio, newspaper investigated why there was such a difference among college sports teams about the kinds of information that were made public.
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Some colleges released almost everything and other colleges released nearly nothing. Reporters found that most colleges that refused to disclose information cited FERPA as the reason. But when the newspaper asked James Buckley, the former New York senator who originally wrote the FERPA law, he was stunned. It was never his intention to prevent colleges from disclosing disciplinary information, said Buckley, who is now a federal judge in Connecticut. He said colleges were obviously misinterpreting the law and planned to urge Congress to amend the law back to his original intention: to protect parental access to school records through the entire educational process, not to restrict them.
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Some colleges released almost everything and other colleges released nearly nothing. Reporters found that most colleges that refused to disclose information cited FERPA as the reason. But when the newspaper asked James Buckley, the former New York senator who originally wrote the FERPA law, he was stunned. It was never his intention to prevent colleges from disclosing disciplinary information, said Buckley, who is now a federal judge in Connecticut. He said colleges were obviously misinterpreting the law and planned to urge Congress to amend the law back to his original intention: to protect parental access to school records through the entire educational process, not to restrict them.
How much of a difference does parental access to these records make? Sometimes a lot. A generation ago, parents who were concerned about how well their children were doing in college could look forward to receiving a computer printout containing their children’s grades from the previous semester. After spending all that money, parents think they should at least have that much feedback about how their children are doing. And parents who are financially supporting their child, when they know what’s going on, can make a big difference in his or her behavior.
Thanks to FERPA, today’s colleges never send grade reports to parents. Information about test scores, assignment scores, and even final grade reports are closely held secrets. In fact, most colleges have done away with printed grade reports entirely, replacing them with information on websites protected by passwords.
Grade reports have been off-limits to parents since FERPA went into effect in 1975, but as long as colleges sent grade reports to students’ home addresses, most parents didn’t mind opening the letter from the college and taking a look. It was only when colleges went to computer-only reports that parents began to feel left out of the loop entirely. Like other aspects of the FERPA law, students can sign a waiver allowing their parents access to the reports. Or students can simply give parents the password to the college website. The colleges, of course, usually don’t tell parents about these options, but parents who are informed about them can put some pressure on their children to surrender the information.
Parents who do, however, hit another snag. Because, as explained in a previous chapter, most colleges inflate grades to the extent that no one receives anything lower than a B, the reports are often misleading for parents. Usually, most of the students get an A and the lower 30 to 50 percent get a B. Parents who still believe that a B means
good
need to understand that at today’s colleges it means just the opposite:
below average
.
good
need to understand that at today’s colleges it means just the opposite:
below average
.
Preventing parents from looking at their children’s academic records creates a number of serious problems. Students can drop out of school or stop going to classes and parents aren’t given a single clue about what is going on if the student refuses to tell them. Many parents, accustomed to being called by high schools when something goes wrong, interpret the silence as reassurance that everything is going fine. Eventually, the student might reveal that he decided not to attend classes at all for a particular semester or was convicted of a crime by a campus judicial board and expelled, but they won’t hear any of that from the school.
On one occasion, I deliberately broke the FERPA law by making a copy of a disruptive student’s Facebook home page and sent it anonymously to her parents. The page featured a photo of the student kneeling down with a hose in her mouth while her friends poured a bottle of vodka into a funnel attached to the other end of the hose. A week later, the page had been removed and, although she had dropped my class, another of her professors said her behavior had radically improved. This indicated to me how different college would be if professors could simply write notes to parents updating them on their children’s behavior. It works so much better in secondary schools. But as long as we have a FERPA law, students will misbehave and parents, who are usually paying the bills, will remain uninformed about what really goes on at school.
FERPA also interferes with colleges’ abilities to deal with mentally ill students, often allowing them to go untreated. Parents often have no idea there is a problem until their children kill themselves or attack other students.
Elizabeth Shin, a nineteen-year old sophomore from New Jersey who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a smart, talented overachiever and so obsessed with becoming the best in her class that she drove herself to distraction. Her bouts with mental illness began in high school but got worse at MIT, which was known at the time for the pressure it put on students to succeed.
She was treated numerous times for depression at the college’s mental health clinic after a suicide attempt and one of the doctors who examined her had considered hospitalizing her. A number of MIT administrators were familiar with her problem, as were several counselors. Even her friends were aware of her several attempted suicides. The only people who did not know were her parents.
When her parents visited her in her dorm room on April 13, 2000, they had no idea that the night before Elizabeth had held a knife to her chest but had not been able to make the final thrust to kill herself. To her parents, she seemed a little stressed out but no more than usual. They felt there was no reason to be concerned.
The next night, she set herself on fire in her room and firemen had to break down the door in an attempt to rescue her. That night, her parents received a phone call from Cambridge, notifying them that their daughter had been in a fire. She died a few days later and it was only at that point that the college told them about Elizabeth’s long series of treatments for mental illness. They were also told that a dozen other MIT students had committed suicide over the past decade. At MIT, the number of student visits to counseling centers jumped 63 percent between 1995 and 2000. They also found that suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students in the United States.
When the Shins asked the college why they had not been informed about any of this before their daughter’s death, they were told about the FERPA law. When the Shins talked with their daughter’s friends and teachers, they all seemed to know about Elizabeth’s suicide attempts.
“We know about privacy laws and we respect them,” said Elizabeth’s mother, Kisuk Shin. “But this was a life-or-death situation. They told us Elizabeth didn’t want us to know.” Her father, Cho Shin, said, “If they let us know, just the one phone call, she would be alive right now.”
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When the Shins filed a lawsuit for wrongful death, MIT claimed there was evidence of mental illness and depression dating back to Shin’s high school years, so the dispute became one of who knew what and when. The school argued that the parents had passed up opportunities to have Shin examined and they should have been able to read the signs as well. Since her death, MIT has begun a suicide prevention program that includes parents whenever it can. “Part of the treatment plan is to engage the family,” said Allen Siegel, head of the MIT counseling center. “We make it clear to the student that is how you get better.”
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MIT’s practice, however, is not common. The gulf that opens up between parents and students after they head off to college is magnified by the FERPA law, which makes nearly every aspect of a student’s college life secret.
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MIT’s practice, however, is not common. The gulf that opens up between parents and students after they head off to college is magnified by the FERPA law, which makes nearly every aspect of a student’s college life secret.
“It’s tricky because the kid is an adult,” said Dr. David A. Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “If a child doesn’t want them to contact the parent, then you’re in a very difficult situation. It highlights the stress on colleges to be ‘in loco parentis’ to the child, even though they may not want to be.”
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“It’s really frightening,” said Nancy Paetzold, a New Jersey anesthesiologist, whose son Jeremy took his own life several years ago. “You pay $35,000 and you can’t even get to find out what your kid went to student health for. Somehow there has to be feedback. They’re your kids and you don’t get a second chance.”
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The most famous failure of the FERPA law, however, is the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech student who murdered thirty-two people and wounded twenty-five others during a day-long rampage on April 16, 2007. He had been treated for various mental illnesses including anxiety and speech impediments dating back to elementary school and had been prescribed medications to treat them. Although his high school had files full of information about him, the high school was prevented from passing this on to Virginia Tech by—you guessed it—the FERPA law.
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A number of professors ordered Cho removed from their classes because they found him menacing. He wore sunglasses all the time. He would climb under the desks and take photographs of women’s legs and would write violent and obscene poetry. Linda Roy, the college’s director of creative writing, sent letters about him to numerous administrators, but they replied there was nothing they could do unless he threatened to harm himself or others. Under the terms of the FERPA law, it is illegal for professors to get together and discuss information about students, a common practice in secondary schools. If this had been allowed to take place, perhaps the college would have been able to take some kind of action to obtain help for Cho.
Roy attempted to work with Cho on a one-on-one basis but became alarmed by his behavior and suggested that he seek counseling, but no one ever followed up on this request. Students observed him riding his bicycle in circles for hours, listening to the same song on the CD player over and over, or staring out the window. He had been charged several times with stalking women students.
On December 13, 2005, he was found to be mentally ill and in need of hospitalization by a mental health clinic, which declared him an immediate danger to himself and others, but a judge overruled this recommendation and he was treated as an outpatient. Although his family attempted to help him while he was in high school, once he went to college, they lost their legal authority over him and, thanks to Virginia Tech’s interpretation of the FERPA law, the college refused to inform them about what was going on.
His mental status did not disqualify him from purchasing guns in Virginia and he was able to purchase weapons legally on eBay. During the subsequent investigation, Virginia Tech, using the FERPA law, refused to surrender Cho’s medical records, even though he was now dead. They were not released until his family signed a release.
In the final report on the case, Virginia Tech was cited for failure to “connect the dots” and for not taking action to ensure Cho received proper treatment. The college was also cited for “incorrect interpretation of privacy laws.”
In 2009, a follow-up state report found that Virginia Tech waited an hour and a half between the time it first learned about the massacre and when it officially locked down the campus and informed students and officials. During those crucial ninety minutes, administrators locked down their own offices and warned their own families. Why the hesitation? It should come as no surprise that administrators were more concerned about bad publicity than they were about student safety. When administrators were first informed that there was a “gunman on the loose,” they added the message “this is not releaseable yet.” During those ninety minutes, an administrator sent out this message to other administrators: “Just try to make sure it doesn’t get out.”
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In reaction to the Virginia Tech shootings, the U.S. Department of Education issued a 289-page guide in December 2008 designed to help colleges determine what they could and could not make public and when they could call in parents to help. The idea that FERPA prevented faculty and staff from sharing information on troubled students, the report said, was in error. Under the new rules, colleges may disclose information about someone “if there is a significant threat to the health or safety of the student or other individuals.”
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