The Boston School Committee tabled a controversial change to BPS and police information sharing Wednesday night after community organizations warned it may lead to lawsuits.
“We and the community advocate organizations that we work with, all believe in the need for safe schools and the information sharing policies that are necessary to make those happen,” said Avery Farmer, fellow with Citizens for Juvenile Justice. “At the same time, it’s important that those policies protect student information, sensitive information, from improper sharing, and also conform to state and local law.”
The action item on the Wednesday night School Committee agenda proposed altering a 2020 policy detailing out information sharing regulations between BPS and the Boston Police Department.
The change would shift language to reflect that the district now has non-police school safety specialists and not police officers in school — in accordance with 2020 state legislation — and limit what information school staff may share with police and include in incident reports, according to the draft policy, among other alterations.
Citizens for Juvenile Justice, the state agency Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee (MHLAC) and other organizations, argued the policy conflicts with a Boston ordinance passed in 2021.
“The danger here is that whatever this draft policy has done to address privacy concerns under state and federal law, it has missed the requirements that are present in a Boston City ordinance that limits what BPS safety and security staff can write and can share,” said MHLAC staff attorney Matthew Cregor. “It expands beyond the scope of that ordinance, and that same ordinance has a provision that allows those harmed by it to sue the city or to sue those, be it BPS or BPD, who then have the data or information.”
A Boston ordinance passed in 2021 gives BPS student information broad protections, stating that “School Police officers and BPS personnel shall not transmit to or share with BPD or any other outside entities any information about students, including but not limited to Student Reports, through any official or unofficial channels.”
The city law makes exceptions for information sharing in limited cases including state and federal law requirements, judicial warrants and emergency circumstances. The ordinance also gives affected students and their families the right to be notified and meet with school officials when information is shared with BPD or outside agencies.
The changes in the BPS information sharing policy would limit school safety personnel to documenting information pertinent to a safety incident in an internal incident log, according to the draft policy, which would not contain students’ names, parents, immigration status or other identifying information “in no event.”
If police or external agencies requested the log, the request would go through the “Office of the Legal Advisor for review and approval prior to disclosure,” the draft policy states.
Representatives testifying Wednesday said the district has not engaged with the public on the policy change and urged the committee to review “more deeply.”
School Committee Chair Jeri Robinson said the committee will table the policy change “until the next meeting to ensure that we’ve addressed the concerns that we just heard tonight.”
“We urge you to take the time to get this right,” Cregor told the School Committee, citing his work on a case in which an East Boston student was deported due to information shared between BPS and BPD in 2017, “because getting this wrong has grave consequences, particularly for our students.”
