Student privacy policy adopted by board

The concerns over whether the Ouachita Parish schools will be able to release honor rolls, sports rosters or even yearbooks can finally be put to rest.

The Ouachita Parish School Board adopted a policy Tuesday afternoon that will allow the schools to release personally identifiable student information after the practice was forbidden by the state Legislature in 2014.

“Since this came down in 2014, if you put out two pieces of personally identifiable information where you could identify the student, that would be a violation of the 2014 statute,” School Board Attorney Elmer Noah said. “What scared everyone was criminal penalties. If you violated the statute, you could get up to six months in jail and a $10,000 fine.”

The 2014 statute was changed this year to allow the school boards to adopt a policy to release the information if they choose.

The new policy adopted by the School Board would allow for the release of information such as sports rosters, information to yearbook providers, honor rolls, student participation in extracurricular activities and using student information around the schools.

“If we didn’t pass the policy, come next week when children come back into school, whereas we always put the children’s names outside the door so that they’ll know where their homeroom was going to be, those are identifiable student information and would not have been allowed,” Superintendent Don Coker said. “This policy that we’re doing now takes care of those kinds of things. I think it’s a good first move for us.

“This is probably a policy that is going to be tweaked after a year’s time. We’re just trying to make it work for right now. There’s going to be some kinks that’s going to be in it.”

Noah said parents still have options if they don’t like the policy.

“Parents still can opt out if they don’t want to go along with some of these provisions,” he said. “It reverses the presumption from before where you couldn’t release anything.”

The School Board must still defer to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law that sets guidelines for how schools can use and release private information.

The next School Board meting is Aug. 11.

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