Parents' rights supersede privacy law - Newsday.com: When students are seriously hurting, colleges must be able to share the problems with moms and dads

"When my daughter went off to college, the folks at the student wellness center told my husband and me that unless we signed a waiver, they'd be barred by law from letting us know if she suffered a health emergency. She was older than 18, an adult, and protected by federal educational privacy law, they explained.

The same law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, protects - if that's the word - collegians so depressed they are suicidal, students starving themselves into anorexia, even those drinking themselves into a coma. In other words, this law prevents the very people who ought to be part of a student's recovery program from even knowing their beloved child is hurting.

It's one of the laws that appear to have tied the hands of the deans and professors and others at Virginia Tech who knew that Seung-Hui Cho was deeply troubled and dangerous but were thwarted by privacy rules from putting two and two together. So, despite one teacher's heroic personal effort to help him by tutoring him one-on-one, despite a judge's finding that Cho presented 'an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness,' despite a court order that he get treatment, Cho was left on his own. Not even his dorm suitemates were informed about the extent of his inner turmoil.

But as the world knows by now, Cho gunned down 32 students and professors before taking his own life April 16.

I don't know if Virginia Tech notified Cho's parents about his problems - a difficult-to-use exception to the family rights and privacy law allows notification in cases of emergency - nor can anyone know what his parents might have done if notified.

But one thing is clear to me: When a college student is profoundly ill, it is folly to withhold that information from his or her parents. And, guess what, the author of the federal student privacy law agrees.

Former U.S. Sen. James L. Buckley (R-N.Y.), 84, who sponsored the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, says that using the law to deny parents knowledge about their collegians' illness is 'carrying common sense to an extreme and an absurdity.'

Buckley's principal focus when he wrote the law was to guarantee parents the right to see and review their kids' school records and keep students' grades from being seen by third parties. These parental rights revert to the student upon adulthood. Thus, once a student turns 18, he or she controls access to his or her records. That's why the U.S. Department of Education tells colleges they must get written permission from each student older than 18 to release any information from his or her education file."

(Read Original Article - Via Newsday.com .)