HCPSS MPIA Request #2021-194

Requestor
Jason Neidig
Requested Information
I am requesting the following information under the Freedom of Public Information Act for the school years 2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2019-2020:

Overall total number of students enrolled in district (Elementary, Middle and High)?
Breakdown of total number of Elementary, Middle, and High schools in your district?
Total list of all incidents and number of those incidents for all schools combined (Assault, Fight, Disruption, Disrespect, Weapon, Bullying, Vandalism, etc.)?
Total number of students arrested or referred on paper for the Department of Juvenile Services for all schools combined? If captured, how many were SRO arrest/referral, School Security Officers/Specialist and how many were patrol officers called to the school?
What was the breakdown of race for arrest/referral for each school year?
Date Received
Status
Complete
Response Notes

Responsive to this request, please note no existing report/record contains all of the data sought. Under the MPIA process, and as advised in the Fourteenth Edition of the Maryland Public Information Act Manual created by Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General, an agency is only obligated to produce existing records and is not required to generate new data or summarize data.

As such, existing enrollment data, including totals for the district as well as broken down by grade and school, is found within official September 30th enrollment reports per school year on our website: https://www.hcpss.org/schools/enrollment-reports/.

In regards to #4 and 5, HCPSS provides individual, student-level information on arrests to the Maryland State Department of Education, which in turn produces district-level data on breakdowns as requested such as race and arrest type, which can be found on their website at: http://marylandpublicschools.org/about/Pages/DSFSS/SSSP/StudentArrest/index.aspx. As noted above, under the MPIA process, and as advised in the Fourteenth Edition of the Maryland Public Information Act Manual created by Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General, an agency is only obligated to produce existing records and is not required to generate new data or summarize data. The existing information within HCPSS records is specific to each student/incident, which would require access to and review of individual private student files, which are exempt from disclosure under both the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which restricts access to student records, and MPIA GP § 4-313, which prevents disclosure of school district records pertaining to individual students.

Responsive Documents
Please find attached an available report on school system incidents by main violation type. HCPSS must protect against the potential disclosures of personally identifiable information about students as required by both the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which restricts access to student records, and MPIA GP § 4-313, which prevents disclosure of school district records pertaining to individual students. In accordance, HCPSS follows the Maryland State Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics’ guidelines for protecting student privacy in public reporting and suppresses the following from responsive records: populations that fall below 10; percentages that are less than or equal to 5, or greater than or equal to 95; categories directly related to specific student records; and/or information that can reasonably identify an individual student or reveals information from an individual student’s record or could do so when combined with other publicly accessible data. HCPSS has made substantial efforts to ensure the accuracy of this information; however, data collection and reporting is consistently subject to change. Please be mindful when comparing data as many variances can occur between reports based on date pulled, parameters used, categories included, etc.

*Some request language is summarized to include the requester's specific document requests and legally protected information (such as personally identifiable information of a student) or personal, defamatory and malicious content removed at the discretion of the school system.

**Responses containing legally protected information available only to the person of interest are omitted from the above report.

***Howard County Public Schools reserves the right to remove erroneous or outdated documents from this site.