Last Year, I Argued FERPA Requires Parental Notification. This Year, Trump is Enforcing the Law

On September 17, the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office opened an investigation under FERPA and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment into the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough in Massachusetts. The parents of a student at Algonquin Regional High School say school personnel secretly facilitated their child’s gender transition without their knowledge, including a different name and pronouns, and that they believed the after-school sessions were for math help. The department says it is currently unclear whether the school and the district complied with either statute. Superintendent Gregory Martineau denies the allegations and says the district “welcomes and will cooperate fully with any authority investigating this matter.”

FERPA governs papers a school keeps about a student. PPRA governs surveys, evaluations, and analyses that probe mental health, sex behaviors and attitudes, or other listed subjects, and it requires written consent before administering those instruments. A gender transitioning counseling sequence that produces notes, emails, and a support plan is a records problem if those papers exist. The same sequence is a pupil-rights problem if it functions as an evaluation the parents never approved. PPRA’s consent rule covers surveys and evaluations on mental health and sexual behavior even when the office described the sessions as academic help. The department has not said which theory, if either, will hold.

I wrote on July 31, 2025, that Harvard’s Queering Education course trained future teachers to treat parental authority as an obstacle to be managed, and I called for federal investigations and funding consequences. In that column, I also wrote that no one denies that some children struggle with gender identity, “nor that they deserve dignity and mental health treatment.” On October 20th, my Texas ballot guide urged a yes vote on Proposition 15 so that “parents, not bureaucrats, control the moral and educational formation of their children.” Voters approved the amendment on November 4 with 69.87% of the 2,956,697 ballots counted. On December 3rd, I used 𝕏 against the organized opposition lined up against those initiatives.

The department is now enforcing a statute Congress passed in 1974. Districts that take federal money agreed to obey it. Under the regulations, an education record is information directly related to a student and maintained by the school, and that definition already reaches K-12 health records and electronic communications. In March, the privacy office told state chiefs that concealment of gender-identity records from parents was inappropriate. In August, it sent another letter. FERPA, that letter said, does not distinguish among an official record, a cumulative record, and unofficial papers. Information that concerns the child and is kept by the institution remains an education record wherever staff stored it. Gender transition plans parked to the side fall under that reading.

Under 34 CFR §§99.62 through 99.67, the privacy office can demand a district’s policies, training materials, and other relevant information. It can issue findings and require corrective steps. If the district fails to comply within the specified period, legally available remedies include withholding payments and terminating eligibility for federal programs.

FERPA gives parents no right to sue. The Heritage Foundation’s Legal Memorandum 365, by Sarah Parshall Perry, walks through the inspection and correction procedures and then names the hole. The statute supplies no private right of action. The Supreme Court said so in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002). Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that FERPA’s provisions speak to the Secretary of Education and to the conditions on federal funds, not to a parent who wants a judge. Parents may still have constitutional or state-law claims. Under FERPA itself, they cannot sue. Their federal door is a complaint submitted to the department within 180 days of the alleged violation.

That door has been slow. A 2018 inspector general audit found 285 FERPA investigations open at the end of fiscal 2017. The office closed 24 that year. Nearly a third of the open cases were more than two years old, and some were more than six. Officials estimated they were about two years behind and could not precisely quantify the backlog because their tracking was broken. New staff hired to clear the queue were steered toward training and technical assistance. A 2022 follow-up said the backlog had shrunk and tracking had improved, yet policy questions that blocked some investigations remained unresolved. Federal funding has never been pulled for a FERPA violation.

Topeka shows what a signed FERPA remedy looks like. In August, the privacy office announced a resolution agreement with Topeka Public Schools after an April finding that the district, along with Olathe and Shawnee Mission, maintained policies instructing staff to hide gender-identity information from parents, including a different name on a diploma. Topeka agreed to stop creating gender transition plans for students, let parents review any such plans already kept, rescind guidance that kept parents in the dark, and include FERPA content in teacher and administrator training that the privacy office must pre-approve. Olathe and Shawnee Mission did not sign and were told enforcement would follow. Topeka disputed the finding even as it signed.

In July, after an investigation that began in 2025, the department found that Burlington Public Schools violated the pupil-rights law by administering the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey to students whose parents had opted them out. The survey asked seventh graders and older students about sexual encounters, drug and alcohol use, and gender identity. The district had used versions of that instrument since 2012. It admitted that opted-out students still sat for the 2025 version. It was later reported that at least five students received it after their families had returned the notices. Those parents had read the form and sent it back on time. The proposed terms were specific: send the survey questions to the families, have the superintendent apologize in writing, adopt compliant policies, and submit future sensitive surveys for federal review. I cannot tell you whether Burlington signed or mailed those letters, because the department has not said.

Critics of the Northborough action argue that records access will expose vulnerable children to hostile homes. FERPA already carries limits that address that fear. The rights transfer to the student at 18 or upon enrollment in college. A teacher’s private memory aids, kept in sole possession, are excluded. A court order or binding custody document can revoke a parent’s access entirely. Nothing in the statute obstructs a school’s duty to report abuse.

Some districts have tried a different route. Santa Ana training materials reportedly advised schools to avoid creating certain records altogether. If the right attaches only to what the school keeps, the cheapest evasion is to keep nothing. FERPA does not require writing down every hallway conversation. State legislatures and school boards still can set documentation rules for consequential decisions about a child. Christopher Thomas of the Goldwater Institute made the companion point in February 2025, when Arizona’s House Education Committee voted 12-0 for HB2514, requiring written parental consent before a district releases a child’s mailing address, telephone number, or email to third parties. Information should move toward the family. It should not leak out to strangers.

Section 99.10 already supplies a clock. A school must allow inspection within a reasonable period, and never later than 45 days after the request, and it may not destroy records while a request is outstanding. How many complaints has the office received, how old is the median one, how many parents got complete responses inside 45 days, how many districts finished their corrective work, and how many offended again; those figures can be published in aggregate without naming a single child. An announced investigation is not a record delivered; the department knows this, the Burlington parents know it better than anyone, and the officials who want to be graded on press releases are the only ones served by mixing the two.

Frank Miller, who directs the privacy office, explained last week that “Parents have a right to know what is happening with their children at school.” He is right, and President Trump deserves credit for putting investigators in that office after years in which the complaint queue did the work of a refusal. Most parents have a work schedule and a district counter that closes at 4:00. The useful figure is how many ordinary written requests come back complete inside those 45 days, without a lawyer or a camera. I would like to see that count. The administration is the only institution that can collect it.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.