By Karen Gray, NPRI
Remember the Nevada dad who was told it would cost him over $10,000 to see the records the State of Nevada has on his children, a story first reported by Nevada Journal?
He’s been allowed to view those records — without being charged — following intervention by the federal Department of Education. Student information warehoused in the Nevada State Longitudinal Data System, said federal officials, constitutes education records under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act and therefore must be open to inspection by parents.
John Eppolito, the father of four faced with paying $10,194, told Nevada Journal last week that after months of battling with the Nevada Department of Education (NDE), he and his wife were finally allowed to review the records housed on his children in the department’s database.
While Eppolito said it would have taken more than a full day to review and understand all the data, in the four hours he spent reviewing the information, he identified more than 30 erroneous addresses associated with his children.
“These are just four kids,” he said. “How many others?”
NDE uploads and stores more than 800 points of data daily on each public school student, and Eppolito earlier this year asked department officials to see the records on his four children.
State officials responded that the state’s $10 million K-12 data collection program — called the “System of Accountability Information Network,” or SAIN — “was not designed for student-level inspection” and informed Eppolito it would cost him $10,194 to see the information because the state would have to do a “data dump” and create the programming required to produce a “report.”
Eppolito, however, had not asked the state for a report. He simply asked to “see” the information regarding his children that NDE maintained in its database.
Parents’ rights under federal law
Federal law — the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act — entitles parents to review and inspect their children’s educational records, at no cost, regardless of whether they are maintained by the school, district or state.
Conversations with officials at the federal U.S. Family Policy Compliance Office also suggested the possibility that NDE was in violation of the Act.
Such violation, at least theoretically, could mean Nevada losing federal education dollars.
Nevada Journal contacted NDE, citing federal officials’ statement that the state was “supposed to provide [parents] the opportunity to inspect and review [records] upon request,” and that “there shouldn’t be a fee for inspecting and reviewing the records.”
Nevada State Superintendent of Education Dale Erquiaga then sought formal direction from federal officials, asking specifically, in part, if data maintained in the State Longitudinal Data System were in fact “education records” and whether NDE had to write a computer program interpreting the data in order to respond to the parent’s request to inspect and review his children’s education records.
Dale King, director of the federal compliance office, replied with a detailed, six-page July 28, 2014 letter that addressed multiple issues Erquiaga had raised.
