When we launched our Break FERPA campaign, we wanted to see how universities would respond when students asked for their own records in the same over-broad way schools use when withholding public records.Would schools maintain their previously held position, and turn over all the emails, notes, memos, video, audio, parking tickets or phone records where a student is personally identifiable, even if not mentioned by name?
Tag: newsgathering
Journalism groups write Atlanta mayor to protest continued prosecution of arrested college journalists
The National Press Photographers Association and six other journalism organizations have written to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed to protest the arrest and prosecution of two college journalists arrested last year while covering Occupy Atlanta demonstrations.Judy Kim, a photojournalist with Georgia State University's The Signal, and Alisen Redmond, a photojournalist with Kennesaw State University's The Sentinel, were arrested last November and charged with "obstruction of traffic." The pair were standing on a street closed to traffic when arrested and identified themselves as reporters."The arrest and 14 hour detention of college journalists is a tangible example of what is meant by a 'chilling effect' as it relates to First Amendment liberties," wrote Mickey Osterreicher, NPPA's general counsel.
SPJ approves resolution supporting legal efforts to end FERPA
The Society of Professional Journalists is formally supporting legal efforts to bring an end to FERPA, the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act, following a resolution passed last week.The resolution, which passed unanimously at the group’s annual convention, encourages the news media legal community to find a strong case to challenge the constitutionality of FERPA under the Supreme Court’s “Obamacare” ruling.The 1974 law requires schools to keep “educational records” private or risk losing federal funding, something that has never happened in the 38 years the law has been in place.
TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Education Department allows access to records of employee tuition waivers
The cost of tuition has never been a hotter discussion topic. With the sticker price of a year's undergraduate education at a private university topping $28,500 a year -- and the average student graduating with more than $25,000 in loan debt -- serious questions are being raised about whether college is a sound financial investment.Because tuition costs are pinching family budgets so uncomfortably, the public is doubly outraged when it comes to light that well-connected insiders are getting a free ride -- at a cost that inevitably ends up being passed along to the paying customers.In recent years, journalists have brought to light questionable VIP tuition waiver programs in Illinois, where the governor and legislature just abolished a widely abused system of legislator-dispensed scholarships, and in Tennessee, where student government officers at the University of Memphis have benefited for years from free tuition covered by other students' activity fees.The latest free-ride program facing scrutiny is in Rhode Island, where an exceptionally generous perk waives tuition not just for college and university employees, but for their spouses and children as well.
TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Copyright and putting FOIA’d documents in the cloud
Everybody knows the hot journalists out there are uploading their source documents to online storage for third parties to examine.
Supreme Court asked to decide whether states can pull up the freedom-of-information drawbridge at the border
Should the right to obtain state government records end at the state line?In a petition filed June 29, attorneys for two frustrated public-records requesters are asking the U.S.
TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: We shouldn’t need to explain this, but… the ADA isn’t an excuse to conceal public records
Colleges are nothing if not laboratories for experimentation with out-on-the-edge ideas. No thought is too wild, no notion too extreme, that it cannot be tested in the intellectual marketplace of the college campus.That certainly is true of the alibis that college administrators give for refusing to honor requests for public records.
TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: When agencies hide public records behind HIPAA, the diagnosis is “brain death” (or “Chronic Liar’s Disease”)
A campus police officer is shot and wounded. A student athlete breaks an ankle and is taken to the hospital for surgery.
Wild horses drag a federal appeals court to a generous First Amendment interpretation
Laura Leigh's "newsroom" is a dusty Nevada prairie, which she traverses in a battered 1998 Ford pickup in search of images for a magazine and blog focusing on the federal culling of wild horse populations.As described in a colorful Las Vegas Review-Journal profile, Leigh has become a persistent, if affectionately tolerated, antagonist to the Bureau of Land Management and those who run its wild horse capture program.
University of Missouri’s restrictive classroom recording policy raises constitutional flags
The University of Missouri, home to one of the nation's highest-rated journalism schools, is now also home to one scary disciplinary rule threatening the rights of student journalists.In a December 20 memo -- funny how policies impacting students' rights always seem to be enacted while students are away on holiday -- Missouri's interim president, Stephen J.