Choosing Safety Over Privacy

By Amie Steele

Among all the political debates that arose out of the shootings - gun control, mental health legislation, the university's response to violent situations - one important issue has been sent to the back burner: student privacy.

In the months following the shootings, several panels started to investigate what had happened and tried to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. The panels had difficulty in their first few meetings, however, because they had several issues in accessing the gunman's confidential records.

Even after the Cho family turned over their son's mental health records to the gubernatorial panel and after Gov. Tim Kaine expanded that panel's powers to give it better access to the gunman's academic and medical records, panel members still complained that much of the information was either missing or destroyed. Without such records, they could not get a full picture of how the gunman was handled in the mental health system. There were also rumblings that the gunman's parents did not know the full extent of his mental illness.

More than six months later, a Virginia Tech student, Daniel Kim, committed suicide. He had met a friend playing video games online and had told that friend that he was thinking about killing himself. The friend, who went to a school outside of Virginia, reached out to both Virginia Tech and Blacksburg police to alert them. The police visited Daniel, and he denied knowing the friend, saying that he was "fine." Only a short time later, on Dec. 9, 2007, Kim was found dead in his car from bullet wounds in nearby Christiansburg.

Daniel's father, William, alleges that the university never informed him of the situation or that Daniel could have been suicidal. He said that if he had been told by the university, he would have intervened and sought out counseling for Daniel.

At the root of both of these incidents is student privacy. I'm sure we can all agree that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act policies exist to help students and families, in theory. But there comes a point where the university and local law enforcement must choose between students' privacy and students' safety. If the answer is not students' safety, then I'm not sure why we continue to have higher education.

In both of these instances, students' privacy was chosen as the higher priority. If there is one lesson to be learned from April 16, it is that students' safety should always be the first priority of universities and law enforcement.

By Amy L. Kovac |  April 16, 2008; 10:05 AM ET  | Category:  Amie Steele
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