School for School Counselors Podcast

How Do You Handle Student Info When You're Leaving?

May 27, 2024 • School for School Counselors • Episode 98

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Are you preparing to leave your school counseling position and unsure about what documentation to leave for your successor? Navigating the complexities of student privacy and legal compliance is crucial for school counselors. In this episode, we dive into the essentials of managing student notes and records, giving you the confidence to adhere to FERPA regulations while maintaining the confidentiality your students rely on. 

Think of this episode as your toolkit for identifying and balancing memory aids versus  documentation. We explore the CARE acronym—Consider, Align, Review Records, and Empower—a practical framework to help you navigate information transfers. Discover how to communicate effectively with stakeholders, align with the ASCA National Model and FERPA, manage documentation securely, and empower your successors with the right information, all while protecting student privacy. Join us for this insightful discussion, and enhance your practice with the skills to handle student records with integrity and care.


Mentioned in this episode:

ASCA Ethical Standards for School Counselors

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

Stone, Carolyn. (2022). School counseling principles: Ethics and law. 5th ed. American School Counselor Association.


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Speaker 1:

Hey there, school counselor, welcome back to another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm so glad you're back here with me for episode number 98. If you can believe it, we're almost to episode 100. And that's all. Thanks to you and helping spread the word about the podcast. So thank you so much. Who would have ever thought we would have made it this far? Crazy. I'm Steph Johnson, a full-time school counselor just like you, glad to be back here with you for this 98th episode, because I believe in equitable, sustainable and enjoyable careers for school counselors. And that's what this podcast is all about, as we seek to educate, empower and advocate for every single one of our school counseling colleagues.

Speaker 1:

This week, let's discuss something that we're seeing a lot in social media as of late. We're nearing the end of a school year. Folks are thinking about moving to other campuses. Perhaps they're already in the process of leaving their current school counseling program and moving to a new one, or we also have some folks who are going to be new school counselors on campuses, and so, as we consider the implications of that, as we consider some of the transition involved, the topic of student notes often comes up. What information do we leave for an incoming counselor. How is that information handled? How much information is too much and how can we ensure that we are respecting confidentiality and not violating ethics or even laws? So that's what we're going to be talking about in this podcast episode how to abide by FERPA guidelines, what best practices for student records look like, what are the ethics of sharing information and what are the differences in the kinds of documentation that you might have regarding students. Because if we have a clear understanding of these, we're going to make sure that we're not only in compliance with our mandates, but we're also doing our due diligence in protecting student privacy. Now, a caveat here I am not a legal expert, I'm not an attorney, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not anything within that realm. I'm just sharing information per my experience and per my understanding. So I want to really encourage you, as you're listening and considering the information I'm providing in this episode. Lean on your professional school counseling Association, lean on some of the publications of the American School Counselor Association peer-reviewed literature and such. Those are going to be incomparable resources for you, and we're gonna direct you to those in the notes for this show so you can just click the podcast description in your podcast player and all of those links will be right there for you to go check out.

Speaker 1:

Now the first thing that we probably need to talk about are the differences between clinical notes and school counseling notes. Without fail, there is a lot of confusion between these two. They're often conflated, meaning we try to make them the same thing but they're really not, and so we need to really understand the differences and the nuances between clinical notes and school counseling notes, because they're not the same thing. Clinical notes are detailed records of therapeutic sessions. So here we are already we don't provide therapy as school counselors, we don't provide diagnoses, we don't provide treatment plans and we don't write session progress notes. So typically, we would only be doing these sorts of things if we were working in the capacity of a licensed mental health professional. If you are employed as, perhaps, an LPC on a school campus, if you're contracted by an outside agency and if you're providing longer-term, consistent therapy for students, you might be keeping some clinical notes on them, but that's a whole other ball of wax on that side of things. It is not appropriate for the discussion here. The discussion today is revolving around those who are filling a school counseling role on their campuses, because we are not subject to HIPAA compliance, we are not working within a practitioner model and we don't have to demonstrate continuity of care or criteria for accountability. It's just a different ballgame. However, when we are trained as school counselors, a lot of us are trained alongside of clinical counseling students and perhaps are trained as though we are going to be entering that world, and so the notes conversation feels a little strange, right, it feels a little gray rather than black and white, and so that's why we're really diving into this detailed list of differences between clinical notes and school counseling documentation. Again, we don't provide diagnoses, we don't write treatment plans and therefore we don't need progress notes.

Speaker 1:

What we sometimes do with school counselors is capture information in the form of what we call memory aids. So memory aids are brief notes that help us remember interactions or important details with students. They might remind us about the student's preferences, dates that we met with them, perhaps some cursory follow-up ideas, but they're not as formal or detailed as clinical notes and they're not intended as formal documentation. We should not be including sensitive information or confidential information in these memory aids, only strictly what is needed to help us remember where we were the last time we spoke with a student, it's super important that we keep this documentation separate from the student's official educational record. We don't ever want them to be misused as formal student records and we want to protect student privacy and still comply with FERPA guidelines.

Speaker 1:

This is explained in different ways within different contexts, but my primary understanding of notes versus memory joggers is a couple of things. Number one if we provide any identifying information about a student in our notes and they are somehow accessible by other people, it becomes educational record. Memory joggers are just going to be those brief little tidbits that just help you remember, say oh, oh, yeah, I do remember what they were talking about. Now, because, to be fair, if you're carrying five, six, seven, eight or even 900 students on your campus, it's easy to forget the situations of every single student, and we would love to believe that we can remember all the things all the time, but sometimes that's just not possible. So we're going to have to rely on some memory aids to get us through the process, but what we don't want to do is write down a bunch of specifics. We don't want to write down a bunch of identifying information or things that could be potentially problematic or troublesome for the student or their family on down the line. We want to adhere to really general labels friendship concerns, academic concerns, those kinds of things. And even the illustrious Carolyn Stone in School Counseling Principles, ethics and Law, 5th edition, notes that even then the information can be considered educational record. It truly depends on the situation and the context. What does that mean for us? It means that we keep our memory joggers as objective and as brief as we possibly can, while still maintaining their usefulness, if that makes sense. If we go beyond that, then we are definitely in the educational record territory and we don't want to go there.

Speaker 1:

But again, if you're not sure about what you're doing, if you're not sure that you fall within those guidelines, seek consultation with people who understand these things. Seek the advice of your professional school counseling association. They often have legal assistance you can call and ask. Seek consultation with the supervisor or with district level counseling support. Anywhere you need to go to make sure that you understand how and where you're operating in the context of student information, so you can see how this gets really involved. It gets tricky and sticky, but you know what, as long as we're seeking to work with integrity, we're usually going to be okay. So read up on it, educate yourself about FERPA requirements and recommendations, join our mastermind, where we are always talking about these kinds of things to further our own professional knowledge, and make sure that you're relying on the information and guidance of your professional organization as well, because this is tricky to understand. Like I said, it's not black and white. There's a lot of gray area in these documentation conversations, so we want to be careful.

Speaker 1:

Ferpa, which is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, was enacted to protect the privacy of student education records, and it applies to any public or private school that receives federal funds. In a nutshell, what we're looking at is making sure that only school officials that have a legitimate educational interest are able to access those records, making sure that we're preventing unauthorized disclosures, understanding that parents and students if they're 18, have the right to inspect and review those education records, and they also have the right to request corrections to those records. There are also guidelines as far as how parents and students are allowed to request access, how to handle disputes when those arise it gets really tricky. Disputes when those arise, it gets really tricky. And then there are also guidelines for transferring records when a student leaves the school, how we forward those to the receiving school or institution, how they're sent securely, how we track them all sorts of things going on. So if you're not well versed in FERPA, you may want to go pull up the US Department of Education FERPA guidelines or again some of the FERPA documentation contained in the ASCA website. They're going to point you in the right direction.

Speaker 1:

But the point here is that if it has a password because I know lots of you are tracking and keeping information on students electronically it may not be considered a memory jogger anymore. It's probably going to be considered educational record, and that's an important thing to think about as we go on in this conversation. Our school counseling notes that we keep aren't always just kept in a notebook or in a file somewhere. Sometimes in our time trackers, in our Google Forms and in our online professional platforms, we may be keeping brief notes on student information which are, to my understanding, going to be considered educational record and not memory joggers. So again, consult with people smarter than me if you're not sure about that, but, above all, keep yourself informed.

Speaker 1:

How do we manage these student records? What do we hand off? What do we pass on? How do we know what needs to happen if we're leaving a campus, or what should we expect if we're coming new onto a campus? It blows my mind that we don't have a streamlined handoff protocol for school counseling programs. With the amount of confidential information that we handle year to year, it seems like we should have a process like that in place. But nevertheless, we're going to do our best to keep our students' best interests at heart, to follow ethical mandates and still make sure we're on the up and up with all of the other requirements. So I'm going to give you my take on what might be best practices for managing and transferring student information. Again, keep in mind I'm not a lawyer but to my understanding, I think this would be a good take.

Speaker 1:

Number one we want to organize and really look over the records that we've collected on students. If we have memory joggers and we're no longer working with that student, it might be that those memory joggers need to be destroyed. We don't need to keep that information lying around if it's not actively assisting us with some sort of situation or it's not a situation that we anticipate is going to be re-engaged at some near point in the future. We're going to consider which students would benefit from having selected information shared with the incoming counselor. Now I'm going to urge you to give a lot of consideration to this. We don't want to just be handing off all the information willy-nilly. We don't want to be providing a full list of all the students that we provided school counseling services for in the past year or two years. That's not going to be ethical.

Speaker 1:

The only time that we should be providing this confidential information, in my opinion, is if the student's distress is still active, if it is likely to still be in play when the new year begins, or if there is a history of repeated distress that needs the school counselor's intervention and attention. As we consider who makes that list and that list should be very short we then have to consider how do we hand the information off? We must ensure confidentiality to the greatest degree possible and also ensure that the next school counselor is able to pick up and run with the information without having to fill in too many gaps. So, in other words, we don't want them to have to learn all the information in the background in order to be able to jump in. We want to provide them with what they need so that they can get to work instantly, if needed.

Speaker 1:

In order to do that, we really have to clarify what constitutes a concerning situation. What are the situations in which we would want to share this kind of student information? This would be a great topic of discussion with your school counseling supervisor if you have one, perhaps your campus-level administration or even your district administration on what constitutes a concerning situation, what mental health issues, what behavioral concerns or what ongoing problems would constitute a situation concerning enough that we would need to pass along confidential student information. That criteria, best case scenario would be documented in some form or fashion so that you can show it wasn't just you making this call on your own right, you weren't just trying to cowboy your way through the situation, that you really did seek consultation and that you're seeking to work through best practices. So ongoing or severe mental health issues might be included in this, such as depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, chronic or severe behavior problems that disrupt the learning environment for other students or pose a risk to the student themselves or the students around them the student themselves or the students around them or significant and consistent academic difficulties that you suspect may have some underlying issues or need some very specific interventions. And you know that because you've been working with the student. You've been testing things out and there are certain things that do not work, but you have identified some things that are helpful. Those would be good pieces of information to pass on to your next person. As part of determining this criteria, you might have also a candid and documented conversation about parental considerations and legal considerations. You're going to want to check the ASCA ethical standards when you're considering this, the peer-reviewed literature, as well as the FERPA guidelines, to really determine what you're going to release and how.

Speaker 1:

We've got to remember that we only want to share information that's relevant and necessary, and often that means we're going to need to at least attempt to get consent from the student or sometimes the parents, whenever possible. As an example, you might ask something like could I share a little bit about what we've been doing here at school and why we're doing those things, so that this student doesn't have to start all over again when the new school counselor arrives and give the parents or the student the opportunity to say yes or no. Then respect that decision, and sometimes it's hard to respect that decision. It's difficult to accept the fact that perhaps the parents don't want the information being shared. They want the students to start with a clean slate. Sometimes they're fearful of someone else knowing what's going on, and we've got to respect all of those situations. Also, I will challenge you to consider transferring this information, not on paper, because we don't want it to become part of educational record, even inadvertently, but perhaps doing so by phone or in a meeting in person with the next counselor where they can create their own memory joggers aside from educational record.

Speaker 1:

You can learn more about this in School Counseling Principles, ethics and Law, 5th Edition by Carolyn Stone the ubiquitous Carolyn Stone of the American School Counselor Association. She has a huge volume of advice and insights on legal issues in school counseling. I'm referring to the 5th Edition, page 100, if you want to go check that out. It's an interesting discussion. But if you are able to do so in handing off records through just a summary or a quick briefing, try to do so by phone or in person whenever possible.

Speaker 1:

If that's not possible, then you want to make sure that you are somehow ensuring the confidentiality of the information that you're putting forward, whether that's encrypted files, whether that's some sort of secure handoff method. You've got to determine the best modality for the transfer and if you can't ensure a confidential transfer you might need to rethink sharing any information at all. Transfer you might need to rethink sharing any information at all. Ask ethical guidelines A12A, b, c, a3b, a6a, a13c. There's all kinds of ethical guidelines pertaining to student records and communication of information, and I'm sure there's even more than the brief list that I jotted down. So make sure that you're really thoroughly educating yourself on those guidelines and that you refer to them often, because no matter how long you've been school counseling, you still need to be looking at those. You still need to be re-familiarizing yourself with them and keeping them at the front of mind in everything that you do a friend of mine, in everything that you do.

Speaker 1:

So when I consider the possibility of providing student information to an incoming counselor in a school counseling program, I like to think of it through an acronym of CARE C-A-R-E CARE, where C stands for consider and communicate stands for consider and communicate. This is where we would determine which students need the most continuity of support, who are the high flyers, who are your frequent visitors, who are the students who are frequently in distress or in crisis. Those are the ones that are probably going to make this list, and you want to communicate with the student and with their parents about the fact that you're leaving and someone new is going to be coming to take your place, the importance of sharing certain information for that student's ongoing support, and then seek input and consent. If you're not sure what information should be shared or you're having trouble with this conversation, seek consultation. Don't try to do this on your own if the muddiness starts to feel like quicksand. But we don't want you to feel like you're getting pulled down. We want you to be able to do this feeling like you're doing it with integrity and understanding, and that you're doing it with integrity and understanding and that you're doing it on the up and up, all right. So C in CARE stands for consider and communicate.

Speaker 1:

The A stands for align, and when we talk about aligning, we're talking about guidelines, asca, ethical standards, which we've talked about a ton in this episode, ferpa, guidelines, which we've also discussed quite a bit. But y'all, there's so much more to FERPA than what we've talked about briefly here. But you've got to consider these to ensure that you're properly handling student records and that you're properly handling student confidentiality throughout the transfer process and that you're properly handling student confidentiality throughout the transfer process. R in the CARE acronym refers to records and documentation. Keep it in a secure place and arrange for an ethical handoff. Once you're able to transfer information, you want to make sure again, everything's on the up and up, everything's above board, and that you've already sought the communication with parents, with students, and that you're aligned with those guidelines throughout that process.

Speaker 1:

Then the E in the CARE acronym is for empowering your successor. We've got to make sure that we're equipping our incoming school counselors with the essential information that they need to effectively support students. That's going to include touchy subjects like mental health, academics, ongoing interventions, those kinds of things. We have to kind of walk this tightrope. It's a balancing act between maintaining confidentiality and dignity for our students and parents while at the same time giving our successors the information they need to be able to do their jobs, all under the umbrella of student and parent consent. So you can see what I mean about it becoming really gray. It's not black and white, it's not a simple process of step one, step two, step three. We really have to think through these. So it's funny, as I reflect on just hearing myself talk through the nuance of student information.

Speaker 1:

This podcast episode was intended to give you some clarity and peace of mind to empower you in these situations where we're transferring from one school counselor to the next. But I realize, as I hear myself talking, how scary this might sound to some of you, how intimidating the process might sound, or just how terrified you might be about accidentally overstepping an ethical mandate or a FERPA guideline of some sort. And y'all, I'm going to be real with you, it can be scary. That's why we are charged at all times with seeking consultation when we need it, accessing the peer-reviewed and published literature of our national organization to make sure that we're staying in the lanes. So if you're up against one of these transfers, if you're thinking about how we're going to communicate about students with the next person, keep these guidelines in mind, but also remember that ethics are aspirational meaning. If we can prove that we were doing the best we could with our understanding at the time and with the student's best interests at heart, nine times out of ten, everything's going to turn out okay. We still need to be diligent, we need to be vigilant about the way we're doing our work. We need to make sure that at all times we are doing our very best to meet all of these guidelines. But at the end of the day, if we're doing it for the right reasons, it's probably going to end up okay, all right. Again, remember I'm not a lawyer. This is just how I understand it, friends. Again, remember, I'm not a lawyer. This is just how I understand it, friends, all right, that got really muddy. It got complicated and the more we talk through these sometimes, the more muddy and complicated they become. I do want you to remember we do have our support and consultation group running through our School for School Counselors Mastermind. This is a great forum to really discuss considerations, ideas and next steps and to get pointed in the right direction for additional information or how to have these conversations with your upper level support. If you're interested in diving into some of these topics and geeking out a little bit more, hey, we got a chair saved for you right now. You can find out more information at schoolforschoolcounselorscom.

Speaker 1:

Slash mastermind and we are getting ready right now to start our summer book study. Y'all, I am so excited about this book study. I cannot wait to hear everybody's ideas and insights on the text that we have selected. For this summer we are going to be working through a book by Dr Tommy Mabry called Perspective the Secret to Student Motivation and Success. We had probably about 10 candidates for our book study up for vote in our mastermind group and this was the text that won by an overwhelming margin. So we are super excited to be diving into this book this summer. We're going to be going through it chapter by chapter, discussing, consulting and really considering how we can be part of the solutions for student motivation and success. And if you've been a school counselor for any length of time post-COVID, you know the student motivation is a high point of concern on almost every campus you can visit. So this is going to be a super important conversation. We can't wait to dive in and we want you to be there with us.

Speaker 1:

Schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash mastermind. Jump in the mastermind and we'll get you all the information you need to participate in our book study this summer. All right, this got lengthy for this episode. I hope you don't mind, but I wanted to make sure I was bringing you all the information about all the things, whether it be transferring student records, ferpa guidelines, notes guidelines, memory joggers and our summer book study. I want you to feel well-informed and capable. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, but in the meantime, I hope you have the best week. Take care y'all.