School safety outranks privacy, task force says

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Safety outranks privacy, task force says

Since last year's deadly shootings at Virginia Tech, college leaders have weighed concerns for public safety against rights to student privacy.

But Oklahoma's Campus Life and Safety and Security task force says federal privacy laws don't prohibit disclosure of student information if there's reason to suspect a student poses a threat to himself or others.

Colleges and CareerTech campuses are advised to adopt open-door or no-fault-in-reporting policies to encourage people to report incidents or observations that seem unusual.

"If you see a criminal act, you call the police,” said Joe Harroz, general counsel for the University of Oklahoma and a member of the task force. "But what happens on a lot of college campuses is that people see some behavior that seems out of ordinary or of concern to them but isn't a criminal act, so they don't know what to do.”

The task force also recommends that each campus establish a threat-assessment task force to investigate the reports and have access to student academic and medical records.

NewsOK - The Oklahomian

It is not clear to me why this task force believes it is necessary to 'interpret' federal privacy laws it permits it to invade students’ privacy and exceed the findings in the Virginia Youth Violence Project:

A threat assessment is conducted when a person (or persons) threatens to commit a violent act, or engages in behavior that appears to threaten an act of violence. This kind of threatened violence is termed targeted violence. Threat assessment is a process of evaluating the threat, and the circumstances surrounding the threat, in order to uncover any facts or evidence that indicate the threat is likely to be carried out.

There is a short paper describing the Virginia model for student threat assessment, click here.

This seems to be a continuation of an early post: Colleges take hard line on psychological problems