Get ready for the lawsuits . . .

As noted in our blog about non-accredited institutions, including many Christian academies beings swept into this bill, there are legal concerns with House Bill 5468. Use our Action Center to send a message to your legislator HERE.

Because of the makeup of the legislature, there may be pressure to pass this bill even with the known civil rights problems and loss of federal funding. Many know that lawsuits take a long time and cost serious money and require dedication. Please keep a record of how this bill may affect your family (lawless sharing of protected education information, the burden and stress of having to demonstrate “educational equivalency” to SERC as a Christian family), so that a foundation can be established for a future lawsuit.

Fourth Amendment protections against suspicionless searches.

The provision in Connecticut HB 5468 authorizing the routine sharing of a child’s personal information with the Connecticut Department of Children and Families so the agency can check whether a parent is already under supervision raises important constitutional and civil-liberty concerns. Courts have long recognized that government intrusion into the parent-child relationship implicates fundamental parental rights and family integrity, as recognized in Troxel v. Granville. In addition, child protection investigations have been treated by courts as governmental searches that implicate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, particularly when families are subjected to scrutiny without individualized suspicion. While protecting children is an unquestionably important goal, policies that require routine disclosure of family information to an investigatory agency—even when there is no allegation of abuse or neglect—risk treating ordinary families as subjects of government screening.

HB 5468 Jeopardizes Federal Funding for Connecticut Schools

The information-sharing provisions in Connecticut HB 5468 raise significant concerns under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA establishes a clear rule that schools may not disclose personally identifiable information from a student’s education records without parental consent. See 20 U.S.C. §1232g(b)(1). Congress created only narrow exceptions to that rule. One such exception permits disclosure to a state or local child welfare agency only when that agency is legally responsible for the care and protection of the child, and the disclosure is specifically authorized by state law. See 20 U.S.C. §1232g(b)(1)(L). Federal regulations implementing FERPA reinforce this limitation, providing that schools may disclose records to a child welfare agency only when the agency is legally responsible for the child’s care and protection and the disclosure is directly related to that responsibility. See 34 C.F.R. §99.38.

Importantly, the federal regulation also makes clear that such disclosures must be tied to the child welfare agency’s responsibility for the child and the child’s case plan, meaning the information is shared to support the care, placement, or services for a child already involved in the child welfare system. HB 5468 appears to go well beyond this limited framework by authorizing or encouraging schools to share personally identifiable student information with the Connecticut Department of Children and Families so the agency can conduct a review to determine whether a parent is the subject of protective supervision or receiving services and sharing education records of homeschoolers with the State Education Resource Center (SERC) to perform a “demonstration of equivalent instruction” (lines 237-241). In these situations, the disclosure would not occur because the child is already under DCF’s care or protection or because the information is needed for a child welfare case plan. Instead, the disclosure would allow DCF to screen families to determine whether the parent is already in the system.

That approach risks transforming student education records into a screening tool for state investigations, rather than using them to support the care of children already under child welfare supervision. HB 5468 risks creates a system of suspicionless disclosure of student records that falls outside the limited FERPA exception in 20 U.S.C. §1232g(b)(1)(L) and 34 C.F.R. §99.38, potentially placing Connecticut school districts in conflict with federal student privacy law and undermining the core FERPA principle that schools safeguard the confidentiality of student records.