https://ift.tt/GCylMv6 Charron spent the latter half of 2021 investigating how a student at Indiana University Bloomington had managed to re-enroll at the school after violating the terms of a sexual assault suspension.
Under Indiana law, she was permitted to access records on the suspension, but the university denied the requests.
“It was just really difficult,” Charron told VOA. “The university was not easy to work with.”
Charron, a student and editor at Bloomington’s Indiana Daily Student, took her case to the state’s Public Access Counselor, who issued a non-legally binding opinion that the school should release the documents.
With the slow process to access records, Charron had found other ways to get the details needed for her story before the university could respond to the Public Access Counselor opinion. Her article also cites a campus official as saying that under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the university cannot comment on any student’s conduct.
But, she said, “If I was even a little bit younger, didn’t have as much experience, didn’t have as much support as I did, I don’t know if I would have been able to circumvent those issues.”
Charron also sees wider implications to the block on access to information, saying, “[It] wouldn’t really hurt me as much as it would hurt the community to not have a story with all the facts of a university that was trying to escape transparency.”
The communications department of Indiana University Bloomington did not respond to VOA’s request for comment.