Giving Compass' Take:

• LeRoy Rooker, senior fellow at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, shares advice on how school administrators and educators can avoid FERPA violations. 

• How would parents know if the school their child attends is following all of these rules? 

• Read about student data mining scandals and why privacy for schools and students is largely left out of the conversation about digital security. 

Want to throw away old student records? Make sure you don’t just put them in trash cans—shred them first. If you don’t, your institution might get accused of violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, which protects student education records in both K-12 and higher education.

LeRoy Rooker is a senior fellow at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. He’s a FERPA expert, having been the director of the Department of Education’s Family Policy Compliance Office for 21 years. That “clear violation of FERPA” is one of many he’s seen throughout the years, and he says it’s not just trash that schools and educators have to worry about.

Here are other unintentional ways they might be breaking the law, and what they need to be aware of in order to avoid consequences:

Rooker warns that under FERPA, schools are responsible for what their vendors do with data. That means that if a vendor intentionally or accidentally misuses students’ education records, the school would still be at fault.

Parents own the FERPA rights of their child until the child turns 18 or enters a postsecondary institution, McDonald says. However, there are exceptions. One is that, generally, higher education institutions can choose to release a students’ education records to both parents, provided that at least one parent claims the student as a dependent for tax purposes.

If a teacher witnesses an incident such as a fight on a school’s grounds, he can talk to, say, other parents or the press about what he saw. But if the principal reads a report about that same incident, she can’t talk about it publicly. Rooker explains that this is because what the principal read was an education record, which FERPA protects.

Read the full article about FERPA by Tina Nazerian at EdSurge