EdLaw nat/us/state/va/student-records/README.md

language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Virginia — scholastic records and school surveys

The two Virginia provisions that sit underneath Va. Code §22.1-289.01, the school-service-provider statute. §22.1-287 governs who may see a pupil's scholastic record; §22.1-79.3 is Virginia's own survey-and-materials regime, a state analogue to the federal PPRA that in places goes further than it. §22.1-287 has carried that number since the 1980 recodification of Title 22 as Title 22.1 (Acts 1980, c. 559, in its history line), which the Virginia Code Commission's recodification bill puts "in force and effect on and after October one, nineteen hundred eighty"; the Commission's table derives it from former §22-275.26 (Acts 1975, c. 639) with "No material change" (HD21 (1980), pp. 112 and 160).

Applicability to EdTech

§22.1-287 is a closed list, not a balancing test. Subsection A forbids any teacher, principal, employee or school board member to permit access to a pupil's records "to any person except under judicial process" unless that person is one of seven enumerated categories: a parent or the pupil, a person designated in writing, the principal of a school the pupil attends or intends to enrol at, the pupil's current teachers, law-enforcement or correctional personnel acting in the course of duty, the Superintendent of Public Instruction or division superintendent and staff, and a child-protective-services officer for a referred pupil. There is no vendor or school-official category. A Virginia district giving a vendor access to scholastic records is relying on FERPA's school-official exception and on §22.1-289.01, not on this section — which is why the Virginia data-protection addendum is written the way it is.

Research access is superintendent's discretion and must be de-identified. Subsection D 1 lets a division superintendent provide information for a research project sponsored or approved by an institution of higher education or research organisation, but only "if no pupil will be identified by name in the information provided for research". Product-improvement or efficacy studies on Virginia data run through that gate.

§22.1-79.3 puts a written-consent gate and a 30-day notice on surveys. Subsection B requires policies prohibiting any questionnaire or survey during the school day or at a school-sponsored event without written, informed parental consent where participation "may subsequently result in the sale for commercial purposes of personal information regarding the individual student". Subsection C then requires 30 days' written notice to parents before administering any survey requesting sexual, mental health, medical, health-risk-behaviour or controlled-substance information, or anything else the school board deems sensitive. The notice must state the nature and types of questions, the purposes and age-appropriateness, how the information will be used, who will have access, the steps taken to protect student privacy, and whether and how findings will be disclosed — and the parent may review the instrument and opt the child out. Unless required by law, school personnel administering it "shall not disclose personally identifiable information".

That list is, in substance, a product specification for any wellbeing, SEL, climate or health-risk survey sold into Virginia: the district cannot give the required notice unless the vendor can state the access list, the retention and protection measures, and the disclosure plan up front.

And one absolute bar: subsection D — no survey requesting sexual information may be administered to any student in kindergarten through grade six, with no consent route at all.

Other subsections worth knowing: E requires policies on the Sex Offender Registry and on release of children; F requires an email and SMS notification to every parent within 30 calendar days of the start of each school year about secure storage of prescription drugs and firearms — a messaging obligation an SIS or comms product may be asked to carry; I permits electronic records and signatures from parents; and J lets a board adopt a single standardised parental-consent form for release of student data, which is the form a vendor integration should expect to be handed.

Contents

Document Covers
STUDENT-RECORDS.md Va. Code §22.1-287 (limitations on access to records) and §22.1-79.3 (policies regarding certain activities — materials distribution, surveys and questionnaires, registry notice, prescription-drug and firearm storage notification, twins placement, electronic signatures, standardised consent form) in full

Enforcement

Neither section creates its own penalty. They bind school boards and school personnel directly, and are enforced through the Board of Education's supervision of divisions, local policy, and the ordinary remedies against a public body. For a vendor the exposure is contractual and reputational: a district that breaches these provisions because of how a product works will say so in the contract dispute.

Licence

The reproduced text is Va. Code §§22.1-287 and 22.1-79.3, enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia and served by the Division of Legislative Automated Systems on law.lis.virginia.gov. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)

The site footer reads "© Copyright Commonwealth of Virginia, . All rights reserved." (read 2026-10-01). That is a site-wide notice; under the holding above it cannot reach the statute text, which is the work of the General Assembly in the course of its official duties. It may cover the site's own design, which the corpus does not reproduce.

Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line on each section names the publisher, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that the General Assembly of Virginia endorses the corpus.

Sources