The Secretary of Education has proposed to remove the requirement for public agencies to obtain parental consent prior to accessing, for the first time, a student’s public benefits or insurance.

I applaud this proposal.  It removes what has become a major obstacle LEAs face in accessing these benefits for the purpose of the school-based services program.

The proposal summary states:  “As there are no comparable consent requirements prior to accessing public benefits for children without disabilities, the removal of this consent requirement would align public benefits consent requirements for children with disabilities to those for children without disabilities and ensure equal treatment of both groups of children.”

This statement is correct in its specificity but not in its practical application.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) requires (99.30) “written consent before an…agency…discloses personally identifiable information from the…education records.” 

Since a disclosure of student PII would need to occur the first time that information was sent to a Medicaid agency, in effect, there IS a comparable consent for students without disabilities.

The FERPA consent requirement applies to ALL student records and thus, removing the redundant consent requirement from IDEA relieves LEAs from having to reconcile the slight variations between the two.