A FERPA complaint to the US Dept of Education Family Compliance Office will follow soon.
October
22, 2015
Eva Moskowitz, CEO
Success Academy Network
95 Pine Street, Floor 6, New York, NY 10005
By US Postal Service Priority Mail and
email to: eva.moskowitz@successacademies.org
Dear Ms. Moskowitz;
I demand that you
immediately remove the letter you wrote to PBS and sent to the press on October
19, that contained details of my son’s disciplinary record and is posted at [link removed] , as well as the second follow up letter you posted
and sent on October 21 at [link removed.]
As
you are well aware, regulations governing compliance with the Family
Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 require that educational agencies
and institutions obtain a parent’s signed and dated written consent before they
are allowed to share non-directory personally identifiable information from a
student's education records to third parties (34 CFE 99.30).
Some
of the details of my son’s disciplinary history are accurate but many are
not. In any case, I was not contacted at any time beforehand, and I did
not give my consent to the disclosure of any part of his education record.
In fact, your first letter
includes an email from John Merrow of PBS, saying that I “was unwilling to
release [my] son’s records.” This is further documented by PBS, in
their response to the letter, in which they write: “the mother was not
willing to allow Success Academy to release her son’s school records.”
You yourself admitted that I was “refusing to waive her son’s privacy rights.”
Your first letter has now
been linked to by many blogs and media outlets, including the PBS
website. Your action by disclosing this information which contains
significant inaccuracies have caused me and my son great harm, and I demand
that you immediately take it down from your website.
This disclosure of my son’s
disciplinary records without my consent is not only unethical, but also a
serious violation of federal law. I hereby demand that you immediately cease
and desist from causing further harm to my son’s privacy rights by removing the
letter from your website, and ending all unauthorized disclosures. I also
demand that you produce an accurate record of all third parties to whom you
specifically disclosed my son’s non-directory information without my consent.
I will follow up with the
remedial steps you need to take to mitigate the damage caused by your unlawful
conduct, and to schedule a complete review of all of my son’s school records to
correct the inaccurate and libelous information the school has apparently
inserted in his education records.
Sincerely,
Fatima Geidi
[address and email removed]
