News & Observer (5/20/2014): Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins ruled Monday that releasing a spreadsheet that shows athletes enrollment in by sport in fraudulant classes, with names redacted, would violate federal student privacy protections.
In January the News & Observer filed a public records lawsuit against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after it refused to turn over the spreadsheet. The university previously released similar data for other years, but said that releasing the information at issue in the lawsuit would violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law the protects certain information in student records. The university claimed that if it released the spreadsheet, people would be able to identify individual students if they compared the data to previously released information.
Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins agreed with the university’s position and said that it could withhold the information, citing FERPA.
Read the News & Observer story here.