Trump Administration Takes on School Emails as Parental Rights Issue

In April, the U.S. Department of Education resolved an obscure 2013 privacy complaint — a dispute so old that the student at the heart of it has almost certainly graduated by now. The Wisconsin district involved in the dispute has had two superintendents since the complaint was first filed, and the current chief said the department’s finding came out of the blue. 

While the matter focused on a student with disabilities, Trump officials appear to have homed in on it because it addressed a separate question central to the administration’s agenda: Do parents have a right to read staff emails about their children?

With the administration accusing districts of hiding students’ gender transitions from parents, experts say their answer is yes. 

“I don’t think there’s any question that they’re going to say [emails] should be available to parents,” said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon signaled the department’s intention in March when she said districts have turned the “concept of privacy on its head to facilitate ideological indoctrination … without parental interference or even involvement.” 

In a message to the Wisconsin district, a department official acknowledged the issue’s importance to parents, students and school officials and said that districts can expect “guidance or regulations in the foreseeable future.” Contacted Aug. 14, department spokeswoman Madison Biedermann had no updates on timing. 

Enforcing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which gives parents the right to inspect and amend their children’s education records, is a central focus of the administration’s parental rights agenda. The law was enacted 50 years ago, long before the advent of digital records. In the past, courts have sided with districts that argued emails were not education records, while parents say they should be treated just like report cards or schoolwork. Districts are likely to push back on being required to disclose internal messages about students, Vance said. Not only might a search eat up staff time, but “people say stupid things in emails.”

‘Numerous’ requests

Biedermann, the department spokeswoman, would not say why officials revived the 12-year-old complaint.

But in the March letter reminding states of their responsibilities under FERPA, McMahon said “schools are routinely hiding information about the mental and physical health of their students from parents.”

In a sign of its commitment to reshaping FERPA, the department hired Lindsay Burke in June as its deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. The author of the education section of Project 2025, a vision for Trump’s second term, she contends that FERPA should offer parents the right to sue districts they think have violated their rights. Filing a complaint is currently the only option under the law. She also argues that students shouldn’t be able to change their gender identity at school without a parent’s permission.  

Like many districts faced with similar FERPA requests, Middleton Cross Plains, northwest of Madison, leaned on a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that many experts feel is out of step with the digital age. It suggests that communications like email are not part of a student’s official record unless they are printed and physically placed there. 

FERPA was originally intended to target records “stored in file folders and cabinets,” said Andrew Manna, an Indiana attorney who represents districts. “There is no software that I am aware of that can sort through the digital storage of emails, so it is a ‘hide and seek’ approach to trying to find the email specific to a student.” 

Districts also say that combing through years of emails is too burdensome for staff and is likely to produce irrelevant communication. Vance suggested that argument might be outdated “at this moment in time with what AI is capable of.”

But while there might be more tech tools to conduct searches, there’s no guarantee AI is secure, said Stephanie Jones, an attorney with a firm representing districts in Illinois. 

Searching emails “is both an art and a science,” she said. As an example, a district she represents once had a request for emails related to a student with the last name Fridge. “You wouldn’t believe how many employees try to sell their college kid’s dorm room fridge through district email.”

In the Wisconsin case, Frank Miller, acting director of the Education Department’s privacy office, determined that the district was simply following long-standing legal precedents on FERPA when it declined to provide a parent with staff emails about her child. 

Superintendent Dana Monogue wasn’t in charge when the parent filed the complaint, but said she was pleased with the outcome.

“Like all districts, we receive numerous student record requests each year and this letter will provide useful guidance regarding our obligations,” Monogue said. 

But while he gave the district a pass, Miller had more to say. 

He referenced a second court ruling, from 2009, that often guides the way districts handle requests for emails. In S.A. v Tulare County Office of Education, a federal district court in California said an email about a student is only part of the official record if the district “maintains” it in a central location.

Emails “have a fleeting nature” and “may be sent, received, read and deleted within moments,” the judge said in that case. 

The department, Miller said, rejects the Tulare interpretation, even though it’s been widely adopted by districts. Middleton Cross Plains officials told the parent that it used Infinite Campus, a “third-party, cloud-based” system to store emails, and said that emails that are “simply still on a server” are not education records.

A recent Nevada case is another sign that the legal landscape could be shifting. The state Supreme Court ruled that emails stored in an online platform are still subject to FERPA.

‘Defies reality’

Jim Wheaton, an associate professor at William and Mary Law School, has little tolerance for districts that turn down parents’ requests for emails.

“Essentially, a school [or] district can simply decide not to physically put something in a file, and important, relevant discussions about a child suddenly fall outside FERPA,” said Wheaton, who runs a law clinic for students who intend to work as special education advocates. “The idea that files continue to be physical paper defies reality.”

As an alternative, some parents file public records requests to obtain emails, but districts often charge hefty fees to cover the staff time involved, and may heavily redact the documents before releasing them. Wheaton said public records laws are not an adequate FERPA substitute.

“I once received a letter asking me to prepay a quarter million dollars before they would do the search,” he said.

In 2024, Tamara Quick, a Virginia mother of five, asked the Spotsylvania school district for emails regarding her ninth-grader. Because of her dyslexia, Brennan attends a private school at the district’s expense.

When Quick learned teachers weren’t following her daughter’s special education plan, she hoped some email exchange between the district and the school might reveal why Brennan wasn’t being challenged in reading and spelling. 

“Any information you have about my kids, I have a right to see,” she said. 

Instead, the district said it had not “maintained” any communications with the girl’s teachers and, therefore, had “no education records responsive” to her request. Quick ultimately took the district to court, saying she couldn’t get the emails through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act either. 

In court records, the district said she never filed a formal request. An attorney for the district said officials “make every effort” to produce the records parents want, but “do not have time for games.”

The district eventually offered to look for emails for Quick and give her a cost estimate. But she didn’t think she should have to pay. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Act, parents have a right to inspect their children’s records before a meeting to discuss special education services. 

She’s paying anyway. To this date, she’s spent over $30,000 on her case, withdrawing funds from a retirement account.

“Obviously it would have been cheaper for me to say, ‘OK, I’ll pay $2,000 for you to search for these emails,’ but that would be me agreeing that was appropriate,” she said.

‘Very negative things’

Parents may have multiple reasons for requesting staff emails, but McMahon’s March letter about privacy focused primarily on gender issues. Schools, she said, “promote and enable the transitioning of minor children, regardless of their mental state or their vulnerabilities.”

That’s what worried Amber Lavinge, a Maine parent, when she sought emails between staff members in the Great Salt Bay Community School district. It was late 2022 and she had just learned that a school social worker had given her 13-year-old daughter a chest binder to support a gender transition. But the district didn’t provide what she was looking for, said Adam Shelton, an attorney with the libertarian Goldwater Institute, which is handling her lawsuit against the district. 

“She had a lot of questions and was just trying to understand what was going on,” he said. While the case, pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, doesn’t focus on emails or student records, he said he has a hard time understanding how any form of communication pertaining to a student wouldn’t constitute an education record. “Schools exist for the sole purpose of educating children.” 

Narrowing down which emails to release might be tricky, but Matt Cohen, a civil rights attorney in Chicago, said there are other reasons why districts avoid it.

“Sometimes teachers or administrators say very negative things about a child or the parents in the email that they’re not saying publicly,” he said. “It helps to establish that there is actual animus or discrimination going on.”

Jones, the other Illinois attorney, agrees that there can be a “reputational cost” for districts if they have to release embarrassing emails. That’s why she advises district staff to avoid “watercooler conversations” in emails — something many more are likely to take seriously if they know parents might read what they write, Jones said. 

“It has to pass the grandma test,” she said. “If you don’t want your grandma reading it, then don’t put it in an email.”

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