He admitted to murdering three fellow students, but Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. still has privacy rights. The University of Virginia contends that such rights trump the expressed desire of the families that Jones devastated — families who still don’t know why their sons died and hope the lessons learned from their deaths could keep other students safe in the future.
The university now finds itself defending why the most important pages in a review of the shooting, which cost Virginia taxpayers $1.5 million, have been redacted.
"The Nov. 13, 2022 external review reports are directly related to one or more students and contain personally identifiable information taken from education records," UVa spokeswoman Bethanie Glover told The Daily Progress in an email. "Those portions of the reports cannot be disclosed under FERPA without student consent."
Glover was responding to a Daily Progress request for clarity after Happy Perry, whose son D’Sean was one of three students Jones gunned down in 2022, revealed to the public last week that redactions had left the report unreadable.
"There’s nothing in there," Happy Perry previously told The Daily Progress. "They’ve taken everything out."
As she told The Daily Progress, redactions obscure a majority of the taxpayer-funded report she had hoped would tell her what led to the Nov. 13, 2022, shooting that killed her son. Lavel "Tyler" Davis Jr. and Devin Chandler also died in the gunfire aboard a chartered bus returning to UVa Grounds from a field trip to Washington, D.C. Two other students were shot, fellow football player Mike Hollins and second-year student Marlee Morgan, both of whom recovered from their injuries.
Megan Rhyne, director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, contends that UVa is taking an overly expansive view of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law better known as FERPA.
"FERPA doesn’t mean that you can’t mention somebody," said Rhyne. "There’s this tendency to think it shields anything and everything about a student."
Rhyne suggested that the lawmakers who drafted the law, enacted under President Gerald Ford in 1974, likely never imagined that a school would use it to halt the release of a report supposedly dedicated to public safety.
Four months after the 2007 slaying of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech, then-Gov. Tim Kaine released a 260-page report, still available for download as a PDF. There’s an entire chapter devoted to the shooter’s childhood and mental health plus multiple pages specifying his interactions with professors, administrators and fellow students before the attack.
UVa’s response has been different. After promising to provide the report to the public, more than two years — and one document-seeking court battle led by The Daily Progress — have elapsed.
Last year, top university officials were found to have summoned Albemarle County’s top prosecutor, Jim Hingeley, who would later claim that justice for Jones necessitated the report’s delay. The meeting with Hingeley was reported only after The Daily Progress filed a records request on Hingeley. The same request filed on UVa turned up no responsive records, even though it turned out that it was UVa Police Chief Tim Longo who had invited Hingeley via text message to an "urgent" meeting with him, UVa Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis and UVa President Jim Ryan.
Neither Longo nor university spokesman Brian Coy responded to The Daily Progress’ more recent request for comment on Longo’s apparent breach of Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
As for the redactions in the report that UVa is now promising to provide in "mid-March," some 28 months after the shooting, Rhyne said that redactions should be limited — not entire pages of material as Happy Perry described.
"You can redact names; you can redact identifying information," said Rhyne. "But you can still say what they say."
Rhyne also pointed to a webpage maintained by the U.S. Department of Education which shows that FERPA should not be interpreted to bar universities from releasing information that might save lives.
"For instance," department officials wrote, "if a school official knows that a student, who has been disciplined for bringing a gun or knife to school or threatened to hurt students and/or teachers, is planning to attend a school-sponsored activity at another high school, FERPA would allow that school official to notify school officials at the other high school."
Rhyne said the public interest suggests that the law should not be construed narrowly.
"FERPA is not designed to make students anonymous," she said. "It’s designed to protect their scholastic records."
While Glover, UVa’s spokeswoman, contends that information derived from educational records renders them unreleaseable, Rhyne contends that the law was never intended to cover every facet of student life and specifically exempts law enforcement records and private notes jotted down by administrators.
"Universities and school districts tend to over-rely on FERPA," said Rhyne. "But they say things about students all the time — whether it is to highlight them on the basketball team roster, winning this great award or listing them in the credits to a play, and they put students in promotional brochures and videos."
Virginia state law reserves a university’s right to release a student’s image, field of study, dates of attendance and even their address and birth date — as long as each student gets the chance to opt out of such disclosures.
UVa chose to cease the release of all student directory information in 2017, according to Glover.
Glover directs anyone wishing to confirm that someone is a current UVa student to contact a firm called the National Student Clearinghouse. According to its website, the "trusted source for education verification" charges $4.95 to confirm that someone is currently enrolled in a postsecondary institution, while the fee for confirming a degree is $19.95.
And yet, as a lawyer pointed out in court during The Daily Progress’ first legal battle to release the report, every time UVa mentions the names of the three young men slain and the other two students injured on that fateful bus ride, the university violates its own strict FERPA interpretation. Ditto for the shooter, who agreed in November to a plea deal with prosecutors and who has obtained an unredacted copy of the report, according to the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.
The Daily Progress has since appealed a judge’s decision to allow that same commonwealth’s attorney’s office to intervene in its case and block the report’s release. The newspaper expects to appear before the Virginia Court of Appeals sometime this year.
After the shooting, The Daily Progress obtained a copy of the search warrant that showed that Jones kept a semi-automatic rifle, a pistol, ammunition, magazines and a device used to make bullets fire faster in his on-Grounds dormitory.
On Nov. 20, Jones pleaded guilty to three charges of first-degree murder, two charges of malicious wounding and five firearms charges. As he awaits sentencing, there is nothing preventing him from receiving five life sentences in prison. But according to UVa, there is something preventing the public learning what led to the shooting: FERPA.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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