Open Records Act updated on campus

By Joseph Tkacik
Staff Writer

There have been changes in Georgia’s Open Record Act on campus, and some of these changes are important due to the new penalties and time constraints surrounding them.
“A failure to respond to an open records request within three businesses days can be prosecuted as a misdemeanor. The actual prosecutions are very rare, but the person receiving the request is the one at risk,” said Quintus Sibley director of legal affairs. “For that reason I have authorized persons receiving requests to respond without consulting me, so that we can avoid unnecessary delay.”
If there are any reasons that the requested records cannot be processed in three business days, then the party must be notified in those three days and be given a timetable for when the records will be available to them.
The people who request these records can vary from students to marketers. The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act protects certain types of information from being given out to requesters of this information.
FERPA gives students these rights; the right to inspect and review educational records, the right to seek the amendment of educational records, the right to consent to the disclosure of educational records, the right to obtain a copy of the schools Student Records policy, and the right to file a complaint with the FERPA office in Washington, D.C.
There have also been a few updates to the fees that are charged to the recipients of these records.
“GC&SU’s policy is to charge $0.25 per page for each page for any request that exceeds 50 pages. In other words for 50 pages or less, there is no charge. For 51 pages, the charge is $12.75,” Sibley said. “The Act itself authorizes a charge of $0.25 per page plus an administrative fee based on the hourly wage of the lowest compensated person competent to process the request. We have elected to go with the simpler approach described above in charging fees. To charge the fee we, must notify the person in our response that they will be charged a fee.”
For those students who don’t wish to have any of their personal information disclosed, they can simply fill out a form provided to them by FERPA.
To obtain one of these forms you can contact Quintus Sibley at qsibley@mail.gcsu.edu.
If you have any more questions regarding the matters contained in the open records act, you can view a website dedicated to this such cause at: www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/rms/ora.htm, or you can see the University Of Georgia’s explanation at: www.uga.edu/uc/gora/.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 15 2002. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry