Notification bill not the answer

News Virginian
Published: February 14, 2008

Many of the exercises of modern, bloated government are foolish, futile and just plain inane, but none more so than government's attempts to fix problems it created. Recent Richmond deliberations over whether to require colleges to inform parents when their children might be on the verge of homicidal rage are a striking example.

Del. Robert B. Bell, R-Charlottesville, has proposed a bill that would require the state's public colleges and universities to notify parents if a student is deemed a danger to himself or others. The parents of Virginia

Tech's Seung Hui Cho apparently learned about this danger in his case sometime after he killed 32 students and then himself, and by then, of course, it was a little late for a parental heart-to-heart.

Virginia Tech officials had fretted over Cho, given his proclivity for writing macabre plays and the trifling fact that a judge had deemed the troubled loner a threat to himself and others. But the university kept quiet, fearing that privacy laws prevented them from notifying Cho's parents. The university was wrong. Privacy laws prevent universities from sharing students' grades, but not from alerting parents to students at risk of going on bloody rampages.

The American Council on Education explains: "There is widespread confusion about what federal and state privacy laws allow," said Terry Hartle, a spokesman for the group representing two- and four-year colleges.

Of course there's confusion. State and federal governments have stacked student privacy laws high and wide enough to form their own Blue Ridge Mountains. Buried somewhere beneath the pulp is the capacity for reason and logic that guided school officials before so many of their actions fell under government dictate.

In the process of that transformation, government decided that students' grades should be kept private from parents, despite the fact that many of those parents are paying hard-earned money to send their children to college.

So while parents can be assured of receiving notice that exorbitant tuition fees are due for little Johnny, or little Cho, but they might not know that his calculus grades have taken a sharp southward turn or that he appears to be mulling over something drastic, such as storming into a building and shooting everybody inside.

Bell's solution is to compel schools to inform parents in cases of the latter. Some people worry that children whose parents are abusive will be placed in jeopardy by this stipulation. Such reasoning is so absurd only lawmakers and liberals will believe it. Since a minute number of parents are abusive, the vast majority, which is not abusive, should be prohibited from knowing whether children are in danger.

Some people, albeit not many, are inclined to eat ice cream and Doritos until they are too large to hoist themselves off the couch. So the logic follows that we should ban ice cream and Doritos. And couches.

The real problem with Bell's bill is not about the remote possibility that some cretin parent would hear about his or her child's struggles, but that it would impose still another government requirement. Confusion over government requirements, remember, is what kept Cho's parents in the dark in the first place. Neither the law nor a simple sense of right and wrong prohibits alert school officials or teachers from picking up the phone when a child appears headed for trouble.

We agree with Bell's emphasis on drawing parents into the discussion. He demonstrates a trust and confidence in parents that too many in government lack. But more government mandates are not the answer.