deleted, meant to start new thread
It doesn’t have anything to do with behavior or suspensions, but here’s one example. My son just graduated from college. Or not. The registrar said he was one credit short, his adviser said he had everything he needed. It boiled down to a question about an AP course he had taken in high school five years ago. If his high school didn’t still have a record of the course and his grade, he’d be heading into yet another year of college.
I just got my permanent record yesterday from high school (Class of '79). Blurry, unreadable xeroxes of my old report cards and no mention whatsoever of the underground newspaper I published with stolen school supplies.
Note that there is a difference between “transcript” and “permanent record.” Transcripts are sent out all the time. You can request them at the Main Office and probably get a sealed copy the same day. Discipline, psych profiles, testing, evaluations, observations and the like are different. They have to show it to you, as noted above, but they don’t have to give it to you. Last time I looked, they were digitizing as many old files as they could in our district.
As for others who can access these records…law enforcement is the chief one. If you were a normal student, they won’t find anything even remotely interesting in your file.
We’ve started listing student NCLB scores on transcripts. Mainly as a motivator. The kids know the tests can’t be used by the school against them, and the scores can’t affect their grades, so some kids just blow off the tests. Knowing that the scores are on the transcripts that colleges get keeps some of them in line.
My family moved around a lot, & my record certainly did not follow me.
Only the grades.
If you went to high school or college in China, you would have a permanent record, and it would have consequences for your life after school.
More properly, the implied threat should be “a record kept for an indefinite time, with variable protection around its accessibility.”
While that indefinite time may extend into adulthood, my own observation is that society is increasingly less concerned with a misspent remote past than a well-spent recent past. High-school records affect little more than college applications, since high-school level jobs pretty much only care if you graduated or not (and frequently don’t even document that).
A handful of later-life positions precipitating deep background checks, either for sensitive positions (Secret Service, e.g.) or voyeurism (political positions, e.g.) might access past records otherwise filed away in dusty bins or computer tapes. Nevetheless, for the most part the threat as it relates to school records and school-level offenses is empty. No one cares why you got kicked out of Algebra unless a criminal offense was involved (which would be more than a school record).
As to policies regarding disposal of records: I’m in healthcare and we lead the way (along with the gubmint) in religiously preserving every scrap of every thing forever. Finding it? That’s frequently another matter. But the psychology of the Record-Keepers in every business is, indeed: This is Permanent. Holy. File it away. Box it up. Microfilm it. Computerize it to Optical. Never know when it will be Needed. The default policy in practice for a Record-Keeper is almost always “Forever” … any other policy to the contrary be Damned as Inappropriate.
I’d bet dollars to donuts that nobody in the world could conclusively prove I ever graduated from high school. I have a feeling whatever records of the event existed in 1990 are either destroyed, incompatible with any existing machine, or have vanished into a bureaucratic maze. The one and only time they mattered was in spring of 1990 when my transcript was mailed to the university I ended up going to.
And if by some miracle you could find a transcript, that’s likely the only record you’d find.
I’m sure that’s true, UNLESS you went to a private school that wanted to hit you up for money occasionally. My old Catholic high school knows where I am and where to call during fund drives each year… but I’d be astonished if they still had any record of my grades, let alone my detentions.
At LEAST as far back as “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” people have been cracking jokes about “your permanent record,” and how important it was to get into the right fraternity.
When I applied to return to college for a new degree and transfer my credits, the school in question (Stanford) was one of about 150 which requires the applicant to fill out the Common Application online. Supplying a high school transcript was either required or recommended (I can’t recall which), so I visited my old Catholic high school to get my records from more than 30 years ago.
They not only still had my transcripts, college test scores, and IQ on (paper) file, the photocopies they provided me also had my musical aptitude scores from my (also Catholic) elementary school and high school detention/disciplinary notes (there were no entries because I was such an utterly hopeless goodnik, a fact I deeply regret now (dammit, Rick! We coulda been playing around all that time! Oh, how I lusted for you!)… uh hum, back to reality…)
And get this: The copies listed sociability, behavior (non-disciplinary-related), religiosity (including such trivia as how often I attended Mass there in the school), tardiness, locker cleanliness, athletic skills in gym, and even penmanship scores for every single quarter of high school. And the happy little privacy-insulting cherry on the top was that – also for every quarter – they also rated my appearance! (“Hair’s too long; parent’s should be called.”) At least they didn’t record my “acne scores”, too!
Talk about a permanent record! Youch!
I got my permanent record copied about 5 years after I graduated, mainly so I could get my IQ test records to apply to Mensa. I was surprised at how boring the record was - a collection of poorly photocopied grade cards, several achievement/standardized test results, and some administrative notes on busing reimbursement applications. I read a few years ago that the records had all been destroyed after 20 years, so they’re probably gone.
That’s nothing. My old Catholic high school closed in 1984 and was merged with another high school. THAT school closed in 2003 and was merged with a third high school. They know who I am and how to contact me!
I was in high school in the 1960s and my teachers didn’t have any qualms about threatening us with what would go on our permanent records. And you can find jokes about getting into the right fraternity in this 1963 episode of Leave It to Beaver – which wasn’t exactly cutting-edge humor even in 1963.
I think there are probably pretty much permanent records nowadays mainly due to 100% digital record keeping and essentially unlimited nearly permanent storage of those records.
Yes. Depending on the district they’re usually kept at some depository. In Plano, Texas your records are kept at the high school you graduated from for X number of years before being sent to their depository. People who graduated in 1992 might decide to go to college in 2012 and need to have access to their records.
However. I have an official high school transcript (1994 graduate) and there’s nothing on there about any suspensions or disciplinary actions.
How does one go about getting a copy of their permanent record? Do you just go into the office at your old high school or perhaps the school district headquarters, give them your name and the year you graduated and say, “I’d like to see my permanent record”?
It’s actually a peninsula.
As usual, here I am to supply the relevant quote from Buffy, which always seems to have something to say:
Principal Robin Wood: Now, guys, look, we can settle this one of two ways. You can repaint the walls, or I can suspend you and report this little incident on your permanent record.
High School Kid 1: Fine. Do that.
Principal Robin Wood: OK, I was bluffing. I hadn’t really thought that one through. Listen, this whole permanent record thing is such a myth, anyway. Colleges never ask for anything past your SAT scores, and it’s not like employers are gonna be calling up to check to see how many days you missed back in high school. So, listen, I, I could suspend you, but that would mean calling your parents, alerting your teachers, filling out paperwork, and, quite possibly, having to talk to the School Board, all of which sounds positively exhausting to me. No. No, I think it would be much easier if I just called the police, let them deal with it. Oh, and, in case you’re wondering, this is the part where I’m not bluffing.
High School Kid 2: We’ll repaint it.
When I did it, I went to a tiny building run by the district, where a bored secretary took my driver’s license, and then brought back a file to me. She then did not care what I did with it, so in theory I could have taken all the originals from it and left. YMMVG.
I forgot what eight is for.
Like you, I expected that the black marks on my Permanent Record (overdue library books never returned… publishing, in the school paper and behind the advisor’s back, confidential information I had dug up showing the disparity between the football team’s and drama department’s budgets…) was going to affect my chances of ever becoming employed. A nun once told a kid in our class, who had attention deficit disorder, that he was the kind of person who would end up eating out of garbage cans–the implication being that this was his fate because of things she had placed in his Permanent Record.
Years later, over beers, a friend who used to be a Franciscan priest turned on the lights for me: Kids are meant to believe the very worst. No one will ever specifically TELL you that the Permanent Record is “eternal,” but many nuns and priests want you to believe that your high school transgressions are being noted in St. Peter’s roster.
When I found out that my biological father was a Jesuit priest who had impregnated my mother while she was a Peace Corps volunteer, something snapped inside me and I started to question the entire pile of crap. There IS no permanent record. It’s just one of thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms that were used to control our behavior and our self-esteem.
Go and sin no more, my friend.