School System Destroyed Social Security Numbers After Confusion

First they wanted them, now they have destroyed them. The Social Security numbers requested by the Carroll County Public School System amid confusion at the state level have been destroyed both on paper and in the electronic system built to store them.

The numbers were requested by the Maryland State Department of Education in September to assist with data matching for federal grants associated with the “Race to the Top” fund.

While the state of Maryland discontinued using student’s SSNs as unique identifiers in favor of assigned student ID numbers, the federal government has not. 

This request did not go over well with local residents who said that was encroaching on the privacy of their children.

It’s “too intrusive, not necessary and I am not giving it to them,” said commenter April Rose on a Patch article.

“Identity theft of children is a growing problem,” said Kathleen Rus, an attorney in Westminster. “Thieves use a child's SSN knowing that it might be years before the child applies for credit or opens a bank account and figures out that there is a problem.”

Because so many parents contacted the Carroll County Public School System over the issue, Dana Falls, director of student services, decided to contact the state for clarification.

When he didn’t get the answer he needed from the state, he decided to have the parents contact the state themselves.

“I couldn’t get the right answer through my repeated calls leaving messages, so we put the state superintendent’s number as a point of contact for our parents,” said Falls.

A few days later, he got the answer.

“Contrary to information received by our school system by Maryland State Department of Education staff, Dr. Sadusky stated that the state has not mandated that local school systems collect student SSNs,” said Falls on the Carroll County Public School System website following an e-mail from the state superintendent.

As a result, the county school system decided to shred any remaining documents from the request, purging the computer files where the numbers were saved and deleting records of the Social Security numbers of more than 8,000 of the 27,000 county students whose information was submitted by their parents.

“From the county level we made the decision that they were not something that we needed to hold onto,” said Falls. “At this point if by chance the state department did decide that they needed that information, we would be starting from scratch.

“Staff in a number of different departments heard the same message as we did and it was added to the state records manual,” he said about the SSN collection announced last year.

“I’m grateful that the community responded in the way that they did and got us the clarification we needed,” said Falls.