Failure to Communicate Played Role in Va. Tech Tragedy

Failures to “connect the dots” leading up to major tragedies look all too obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

Among other observations, the review panel appointed in the wake of last spring's Virginia Tech shootings cited failures to communicate about the gunman, Seung Hui Cho, among campus administrators, the counseling center, police, and others. All parties, said the panel, thought that “such communications were prohibited by federal laws governing the privacy of health and education records.”

“The governor's Virginia Tech report highlights the enormous sources of confusion among counseling centers about what can and cannot be disclosed,” said Jerald Kay, M.D., professor and chair of psychiatry at Wright State University School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio, and chair of APA's Committee on Mental Health on College and University Campuses. “Many universities have no policies or procedures to guide faculty, residential advisors, fellow students, police, or administrators about communications.”

Yet barriers are not as ironclad as university administrators may have thought, and they have explicit exemptions if health or safety is endangered, said attorneys and psychiatrists familiar with campus privacy issues. Many such barriers arise from either unfamiliarity with applicable laws or misinterpretation of laws or court cases.

Virginia Tech had established a Care Team to deal with troubled students well before the massacre. However, the unit did not have the campus police as regular members and so didn't know that Cho had threatened suicide or had been involuntarily detained overnight for psychiatric evaluation, said the panel's report. The residential-life staff had not informed the Care Team about several reports on Cho's behavior in the dorms. Faculty concerns about a“ sullen, foreboding male student” who “frightened classmates and faculty with macabre writings” elicited only an agreement from the Care Team that private tutoring was the appropriate response to the troubled student.

Contributing to that lack of clarity about communication may have been the broad range of institutions covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), suggested attorney Karen Bower, J.D., senior staff attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. FERPA protects the privacy of student education records and applies to all schools that receive funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

“FERPA applies to all school settings, including elementary schools,” said Bower, in an interview. “For example, in special education and in [diagnostic] educational testing in schools, should the documentation be considered educational records or treatment records?”

Looking at the case from a purely legal point of view, however, may be counterproductive.

“You have to be cautious in a post-Virginia Tech world that the system doesn't become too constraining,” said psychiatrist Victor Schwartz, M.D., university dean of students at Yeshiva University in New York City, in an interview. “Students won't come for help if they don't have faith that the system will support them.”