A trial court recently issued a published opinion, C.G. v. Winslow Tp. Bd. of Ed., which provides valuable guidance on how to apply the student record confidentiality requirements of the Family and Educational Records Privacy Act (“FERPA”) under OPRA.

The OPRA request at issue in C.G. asked the Winslow Township Board of Education for settlements of any claims made on behalf of students over a 5-year period. The Board provided the settlements, with redactions of the parents’ and students’ initials shown in the documents, as well as the case docket numbers. The redactions were based on FERPA’s mandate that “personally identifiable information” within educational records concerning students must be kept confidential.

The requestors argued that initials and docket numbers are not confidential, but the court held that the Board properly redacted this information in accordance with FERPA. This statute prohibits disclosure of personally identifiable information of students, which includes information that “alone or in combination…would allow a reasonable person in the school community…to identify the student with reasonable certainty.” The judge cogently reasoned that obtaining either the initials of students and parents involved in a case, or the case docket numbers, would enable a person, in conjunction with other publicly available information, to figure out the identity of particular students.

Trial court opinions are rarely published. The publication of the C.G. opinion indicates that the Judiciary recognized that precedent was needed to resolve the unsettled issue of redacting potential identifying information in student records, which various school districts have had to litigate with OPRA requestors. In addition, the opinion will be helpful to higher education institutions, which are also subject to FERPA and, as I’ve previously discussed, have not had the benefit of any OPRA case law with regard to their obligation to withhold information that would reveal a student’s identity.