When students transition to collegiate life, the line between a comfortable student-parent relationship and an overbearing level of parental involvement can become blurred. This is the first in a two-part series examining students' privacy rights, school confidentiality policies and the relationship between universities, students and their parents.
The deadliest university shooting in U.S. history ended in the murder of 32 people during two separate attacks on Virginia Tech's Blacksburg, Virginia campus on April 16, 2007. The massacre created a national shockwave, reaching students at all levels, in all walks of life and in all regions of the country.
The tragedy left students, parents and university administrators eager to implement changes that would prevent future catastrophes.
According to a December article published in the Wall Street Journal, schools such as the University of Georgia, Texas Tech, Ohio University and the University of New Mexico turned to their drug and alcohol policies, making adjustments and exceptions in an act to get parents involved in a student's first alcohol or drug-related offense.
But at Tufts, drug and alcohol policy has remained consistent, according to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman. According to the Tufts University Student Handbook, a first violation of the school's policies will not typically result in disciplinary action. A second violation, however, results in both a disciplinary probation and parental notification.
Reitman said Tufts current policy leaves much open to interpretation.
"Parents will not normally be informed of a first offense, unless a serious emergency situation exists," he said.
Both Reitman and Judicial Affairs Officer Veronica Carter explained that while it is not routine for the university to call a parent on the first offense, they may take such action if the student's or another's welfare may be in danger.
"The Dean of Student Affairs has always had a policy where we will call parents whenever we are worried about the welfare of a student," Reitman said. "It's what I think is appropriate."
Legally, students are protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974, which gives students over the age of 18 sole access to their own educational records and protects their right to correct inaccuracies in them.
But exceptions have been made to FERPA, giving universities more leeway in contacting outsiders regarding their students' records.
Among them is a 1998 amendment to the act, which allowed universities to divulge information about a student's violation of a campus drug or alcohol policy to their parents, provided the student is 21 or older.
Another limitation came in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City, when the U.S. Department of Education began requiring colleges to provide information assisting law enforcement officials in preventing terrorist activity.
Reitman gave examples - behavioral and otherwise - of situations in which the university would need to contact a student's parent or guardian.
"If somebody's in an accident and transported to the hospital; if somebody's unconscious; if somebody's victimized in a way that it's not a relationship they're in, but random violence, [we would alert a parent or guardian]," he said.
Rather than adopting new rules to govern when parents can be notified of student alcohol violations, the university's response to the Virginia Tech incident was the adoption of a new emergency communication system, Send Word Now. The system allows Tufts to quickly contact the entire community through text messages, phone calls and e-mails.
Reitman also said there are more general e-mails sent home to families when significant incidents have occurred on campus.
"When there was violence on campus, when there was suicide on campus, I [wrote] to parents - all parents - letting them know what their students, their sons or daughters, were dealing with," he said.
Tufts Counseling and Mental Health Service (CMHS), an arena in which campus counselors encounter some of the most private of student issues, operates on a similar policy, protecting students' privacy based on guidelines set forth by the law for any medical practitioner.
Dr. Julie Ross, director of Mental Heath Services, said there are "exceptions to the student's confidentiality...if a student reports child or elder abuse or neglect."
"We are mandated reporters," she said. "If someone poses a risk of harm to themselves or others, obviously [we contact someone]."
Following the Virginia Tech incident, Ross said that while a students' confidentiality is not necessarily more likely to be breached, CMHS has been making concerted efforts to improve its prevention strategies.
"I think one of the things that's changed is that we have stepped up training for faculty and staff,...helping them notice and respond to students in distress," she said. "We're hoping to catch signs of troubled students earlier."
Ross also spoke about university policies and how they affect Tufts officials' decisions about contacting parents. She said such policies adapt to changing trends on college campuses.
"The alcohol policies [on college campuses] are constantly in a state of re-examination and evolution, trying to keep up with the shift in the use of alcohol on college campuses and the risk factors that go along with that," she said. "I think it's a difficult issue, and I think that at this point, my opinion is something that is in some ways fluid as I read research."
In the second part of this series, the Daily will address parents' initiatives to get in contact with university officials, issues surrounding students' medical and academic records and students' views on their own privacy.
