A parent in Kentucky requested all documents that involved his daughter, including communications between eight school district employees. The parent specified that this request included documents in any ” tangible medium,” including e-mail. The school district denied the parent access to the requested communications, stating that they were protected from disclosure under Kentucky’s Open Records Act. In a recently released opinion, the Kentucky Attorney General found that the school district’s refusal to release the requested e-mails was improper. Although the records may not have been disclosable to the public under the Open Records Act, they should have been disclosed to the parent under FERPA and Kentucky’s equivalent statute. As the Attorney General stated: “Communications concerning [the parent’s] daughter, in whatever form, clearly constitute ‘education records’ because they directly relate to his daughter and are maintained by an educational agency or institution.” Therefore, the school district was ordered to provide those records to the parent. This opinion from the Kentucky Attorney General, which is available here, serves as a reminder to school districts that their disclosure obligations to parents under FERPA may be broader than their disclosure obligations to the public under applicable freedom of information act statutes.
