Soon, all colleges and universities in Virginia will be required to submit the names and Social Security numbers of admitted students to State police. Police want the data so they can cross-check for sexual offenders who might be enrolling in schools.
The law assumes students are guilty until proven innocent, and it shimmies past federal legislation known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act by requiring that universities give police information before students are enrolled.
The law also raises questions about whether there will be increased risk of identity theft for students. Police will inform colleges of any sexual offenders in their midst after enrollment, and will discard info on innocent students, they say.
Virginia State police Lieutenant Tom Turner says the details on how information will be submitted have not been worked out, but he thinks the police will do a good job managing the data. “We have our own network specialist people. We handle millions and millions of records a day,” he says. “We’re going to secure the data. That’s a given.”
Representatives from Virginia’s schools, including UVA, met with police June 19 to discuss how to implement the new law. Jeff Hanna, spokesman for UVA, was quoted in The Washington Post. “Whether we have concerns about this or not, it’s the law,” he said.
Hanna says UVA has not yet been informed what procedures will be required. Among other UVA security concerns, the school still uses students’ Social Security numbers as student identification numbers, a risk they plan to remedy in an upcoming Student System Project over the next three to four years.
The law passed the State Senate unanimously as part of House Bill 984, which also contains legislation that stiffens penalties for sex crimes. Turner says the State police did not lobby for the bill, but they support it. Some senators expressed surprise at the little-noticed law. Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) was quoted in the Post, too: “I don’t know how that slipped through.”
State police are working with the State Council on Higher Education and the Virginia Community College system. They hope to have procedures for gathering information at all Virginia schools in place by January 2007.