Families & the Community

Report: Judge Withdraws Order to Release Records of 10 Million California Students

By Sarah Tully — March 03, 2016 1 min read
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A federal judge decided against releasing the records of 10 million California students to attorneys tied to a special-education lawsuit, making the decision after parent protests, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Judge Kimberly Mueller of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of California backtracked Thursday on her previous ruling that a database of student information—including names, addresses, disciplinary records and in some cases even Social Security numbers—were to go to the attorneys in a lawsuit.

Parents were allowed to submit forms requesting that their children’s data be withheld. But the court was “so inundated with objection forms that it can’t even read them,” stated Thursday’s Mercury News story by Sharon Noguchi.

Education Week reported last week that the California Department of Education was bombarded with at least 2,400 calls in a four-day span about the student-privacy issue.

Originally, Mueller issued the order so that the plaintiffs in the Morgan Hill Concerned Parents Association vs. California Department of Education case could determine if the state is complying with its federal special education obligations.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the K-12 Parents and the Public blog.