Education Department escalates FERPA cases against Anne Arundel, Ann Arbor

The U.S. Department of Education said Monday that it will pursue Justice Department enforcement against Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools and has given Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools until August 10, 2026 to show why similar action should not move forward, escalating the Trump administration’s use of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, against districts accused of withholding student gender-identity records from parents. (ed.gov)

The announcement is significant not only because of the politics around transgender student policies, but because of what federal officials say the cases are actually about: access to records, record classification, and what staff tell parents when they ask for information. In Anne Arundel, the department said its Student Privacy Policy Office had already determined the district was out of compliance and would work with DOJ on enforcement that could include judicial proceedings and loss of federal funding. In Ann Arbor, officials said the district must justify both its disclosure practices and a policy they say sends gender-identity records into a separate filing system. Anne Arundel, for its part, told local media it first learned of the allegations from the federal press release and had not yet received formal notice or supporting documentation. (ed.gov)

That distinction matters for school systems everywhere. Monday’s action is not a final court judgment, and the federal government’s characterization of district practice is likely to be disputed. But the message to superintendents, principals, student-services teams, and general counsel is immediate: federal scrutiny is now aimed at the plumbing of school operations — what counts as an education record, where it is stored, whether it is retrievable, and whether parent requests are answered fully and on time. (ed.gov)

From warnings to cases

This move did not come out of nowhere. In March 2025, the department’s Student Privacy Policy Office sent a Dear Colleague letter telling schools that parents must be allowed to review all education records, including documents related to a student’s gender identity, and specifically warned against treating “gender plans” as something outside FERPA. Since then, the administration has used that interpretation to challenge state and district practice, including a January 2026 finding against the California Department of Education and a June 30 enforcement partnership with DOJ involving Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. Monday’s action against Anne Arundel and Ann Arbor shows the department is no longer stopping at broad guidance; it is now naming districts and threatening the formal penalties allowed under FERPA. (ed.gov)

Ann Arbor is also not new to federal scrutiny. On June 18, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened a separate Title IX investigation into Ann Arbor Public Schools over athletics and locker-room access policies. That does not prove the FERPA allegations, but it does mean the district is now facing overlapping federal pressure from different parts of the department on different legal theories — a reminder that districts’ student-support policies can trigger investigations across privacy, civil-rights, and records regimes at the same time. (ed.gov)

FERPA turns student-support practice into a records problem

At the center of the dispute is a basic but often misunderstood part of FERPA. The law gives parents the right to inspect and review a child’s education records, to seek amendments, and to control many disclosures of personally identifiable information. Schools generally must provide access within a reasonable period, but no later than 45 days after a request. Those rights transfer to the student at age 18 or when the student enters postsecondary education, and FERPA recognizes both custodial and noncustodial parents unless a court order or other binding document says otherwise. (studentprivacy.ed.gov)

That legal framework is why the Ann Arbor allegation about a separate filing system could travel far beyond one district. FERPA also requires schools to maintain records of requests for and disclosures of personally identifiable information from education records, and schools must annually notify parents and eligible students of their FERPA rights. In practice, that means districts cannot treat sensitive student information as an informal side file if staff are using it to make school decisions, coordinate support, or answer parent questions. Once information is directly related to a student and maintained by the district or a party acting for it, federal guidance says it is usually an education record, even if the district uses a different label for it. (studentprivacy.ed.gov)

Anne Arundel’s publicly posted regulation makes the operational tension especially clear. The district’s current rule on LGBTQ+ student support says school staff “shall work with a student and the student’s parent(s)/guardian(s)” to develop a support plan, while also saying a student may be addressed by a name and pronoun that align with the student’s gender identity without changing the official school record. That means the federal case may turn less on one headline-grabbing policy sentence and more on what happened in a particular school: how staff handled parent questions, what records existed, how those records were classified, and whether they were produced when requested. (aacpsschools.org)

What district leaders should review now

For district operators, the practical lesson is broader than these two cases. Systems should expect federal reviewers to look not only at board policy and counselor guidance, but also at student-information-system fields, separate spreadsheets or forms, email practices, support-plan templates, and front-office records workflows. They should also expect closer scrutiny of who has access to what, whether requests are logged, whether annual FERPA notices are current, and whether principals and counselors know when a parent’s right to inspect records applies and when it has transferred to an eligible student. That is an administrative audit as much as a legal one. (studentprivacy.ed.gov)

What remains uncertain is substantial. The department has not publicly released the full investigative files behind Monday’s announcement. It has not specified which federal funding streams could be affected, and the enforcement regulation gives the secretary several options short of the maximum penalty, including withholding payments, issuing a complaint to compel compliance, or terminating eligibility for funding. Ann Arbor still has time to respond before the August 10 deadline, and Anne Arundel says it has not yet received the underlying documentation. Whether these disputes end in negotiated changes, administrative orders, or court fights will shape how quickly other districts move from quiet policy review to public policy reversal. (ecfr.gov)

For now, the most important development is not rhetorical. It is procedural. With the new school year approaching, districts far beyond Maryland and Michigan have fresh reason to ask a very practical question: if a parent requests everything the school is keeping on a child, can the district actually find it, classify it correctly, and produce it on a timeline FERPA allows? After July 27, 2026, that is no longer a back-office compliance question. It is a live federal enforcement risk. (ed.gov)