University of Wisconsin must release campus records, so long as it does not identify specific students, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. That decision and another ruling served to further expand the state Open Records Law.
UW System schools have to comply with requests for admissions records and statistics such as test scores, class rank, grade point average, gender and ethnicity, the court said.
An affirmative action group had planned to study the basis of race on UW admissions and requested records from 11 campuses from 1993 to 1999. The university turned over 390 pages of documents, according to an associated press report, but would not provide some records because of concerns over student privacy.
The Supreme Court ruled only information that would identify individual students, such as names and social security numbers, could be withheld. It said the university could charge the requesting agency the cost of blacking out the personal information.
In a similar case, the court ruled police departments can release information about investigations if the it was in the public interest to review allegations. It ruled in favor of a Neenah police department that had released allegations about a local schoolteacher.
Again the court said vital information could be blacked out.
The decisions prevent what might have been a chilling effect for agencies seeking public information, such as the news media. Institutions hesitate to release information for fear of lawsuit, unless the court protects the Open Records Law.
In the UW System case, the 4th District had ruled that all records must be kept confidential under federal law.
The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits schools from releasing individuals’ “education records” without consent of students or their families.
But last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case regarding Gonzaga University in Washington that FERPA does not establish individual rights and only limits the amount of federal funding an non-complying institution can receive.
The federal Court cited the diversity of open records and privacy laws, claiming federal statutes cannot offer more than general guidance. The Wisconsin court clarified its law only meant to protect information that could personally identify students.
Wisconsin’s Open Records Law is considered one of the most generous.
— wire services contributed to this report