Question
What are my responsibilities as an early childhood educator regarding FERPA?
Answer
Your first responsibility is accurate record keeping. I cannot stress enough how important it is for teachers to keep accurate records and to make sure they're maintaining those records well. One of the reasons that complaints get filed is inaccurate information that the school refuses to correct. As a building-level administrator, I always took faith in my teacher's ability to keep accurate records, unless they showed me they couldn't. For example, if I had gotten a complaint from a parent that said, "Hey, I don't think this is correct" then I would generally lean on what the teacher tells me is correct, because they've said, "Hey, here's what we've got." It's so important that you keep accurate records and that you maintain those accurate records.
A second responsibility you have is to be very careful about disclosure because disclosing information about a student to other people that do not have an educational interest is a FERPA violation. Like I said earlier, we have a tendency to be far looser in early childhood settings where we will talk to our colleagues about our students. Those are FERPA violations. You can't just sit around in a teacher's lounge and talk about a child's evaluation results or other educational information because you're giving information to people that don't have an educational interest in the child.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for Early Childhood Providers, presented by PJ Winters, EdD.
