SPRINGDALE -- Accident reports available to the public no longer identify drivers or passengers younger than 18.
A law that went into effect in January requires law enforcement agencies to redact the names and addresses of children from accident reports, including those who have died, unless the records are requested by a parent of the child or an insurance company of a person involved in the accident.
Vehicle accident deaths in Arkansas
• Unintentional injury deaths ranked as the fifth leading cause of death for all ages of Arkansans
• 1,362 deaths in 2013 were caused by unintentional injuries, including from vehicle accidents
• Untentional injury deaths were the leading cause of death for ages 1 to 18, with 87 deaths in 2013
• Most unintentional injury deaths were caused by motor vehicle accidents for ages 1 to 18, with 47 deaths
Source: 2013 statistics from the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System of the Centers for Disease Control
Attorneys for Northwest Arkansas school districts say they would discourage school officials from releasing information about students involved in accidents because of the new state law and a federal law that protects student information.
"The intent of the [state] statute is to prevent the disclosure of the identity of a minor," said Chris Lawson, an attorney who advises the Fayetteville School District. "If the school district has access to that kind of information, we would want to honor the intent of the statute."
The new law concerns organizations that support open records policies.
At least three teens from Benton and Washington counties have been involved in fatal accidents on public roads since January, and their identities were concealed on accident reports as required by the new law.
School officials had to consider what information to release after the deaths of two of the teens who were students at area high schools. One teen killed in February in Rogers was identified to a reporter by a funeral home. A family member confirmed the identity of the second teen who died in May in Fayetteville.
A third teen, from Springdale, was the driver in an accident in March that killed a passenger, but that teen wasn't identified.
Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, R-Cabot, proposed the law after hearing complaints from parents in Cabot. Their children were passengers in a school bus involved in a minor accident a few years ago that didn't cause injuries. Chiropractors obtained the names of children from accident reports and sent letters to their homes, suggesting the children be evaluated, Williams said.
Williams said he asked the State Board of Chiropractic Examiners to intervene. When he didn't get a response, he proposed keeping secret the names of children involved in accidents. The law passed with little opposition in the spring of 2013 and had an effective date of Jan. 1.
"There was nothing to prevent less-than-scrupulous attorneys or chiropractors from taking that information and putting it into a database and beginning to churn out letters," Williams said.
Williams has reservations about accident reports being public records and said no one has convinced him the public needs to know the names of children killed in accidents.
"The Freedom of Information Act is not a constitutional right. It's a privilege," Williams said. "If you abuse it, I'll make an effort to take it away."
Exemption opposed
The Arkansas Press Association and the Freedom of Information Coalition fought the proposal because of a belief people have an interest in and right to know the identities of those involved in traffic accidents in their cities and counties, said Tres Williams, a spokesman for the organization. He isn't related to the senator.
"We also believed it could shield wrongdoing in cases where a minor driver may have caused an accident due to negligence," Tres Williams said.
The press association encouraged the senator to introduce a different bill that would keep the information public but prevent businesses from bulk data mining of accident reports that sometimes include names of children, Tres Williams said. The senator ran his original bill instead.
"We had no objection to Senator Williams' overall objective, but we opposed his method, involving the creation of yet another exemption to the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act," Tres Williams said.
The new state law aligns with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, said Marshall Ney, an attorney who advises Bentonville School District. Both laws support a public policy view of protecting information about minors. If a district has information about a student who is in an accident, Ney would advise the district to follow the protections provided by the federal law.
Charles Harwell, an attorney for a half-dozen school districts including Springdale, had a similar understanding. Rogers School District will not identify students involved in an accident without parent permission, district spokesman Ashley Siwiec said.
Lawson said the federal law is tied to federal money, and complaints of violations can be filed and investigated by an agency of the U.S. Department of Education.
Children's privacy
The purpose of the federal law is to prevent the disclosure of confidential information about students that isn't widespread public knowledge or easily accessible by the public, said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. A student's death would be a matter of public record via a death certificate or obituary and is likely already known to everyone in the student's circle of friends, he said.
"There is no privacy interest in dying," LoMonte said. "Therefore, it would not violate privacy to confirm a student's death."
If an administrator has personal knowledge of a student's death from a source other than the student's files, such as a conversation with police, the administrator wouldn't violate federal law by sharing the information, LoMonte said.
"There is a widespread belief that children have heightened privacy rights, but that is largely a myth," LoMonte said.
While some agencies, such as juvenile courts, have a legal duty to keep some information secret, that doesn't mean a "children's invisibility law" exists, LoMonte said. Families taking vacation photos might include images of other people's children. The families can publish and share those photos even if the other children's parents object.
"Once you do something in a public setting, including driving a car, you waive a certain degree of privacy," he said. "A fatal car wreck is most certainly a matter of public importance and concern, and there is no compelling privacy reason why police records of such matters should be placed off-limits."
Other states have passed laws to keep records from being used for commercial marketing purposes while still giving access to people with legitimate interests in the records, including journalists, LoMonte said.
The new state law led the Arkansas State Police in January to stop allowing bulk inspection of crash reports because redacting minors' information was an administrative burden. The state police in June started withholding nearly all personal information on crash reports, citing a 21-year-old federal Drivers Privacy Protection Act.
A Little Rock attorney sued state police in May. A Pulaski County Circuit Judge ruled June 23 that crash reports are subject to the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. The judge amended his ruling July 8 and made clear the January and June state police policies violated the act. The state has appealed and has asked the Arkansas Supreme Court to decide the case.
However, access to children's names was never at issue in the lawsuit, and their names are still being concealed from reports in accordance with state law.
NW News on 07/22/2015