In the spring of 2025, a group of elementary school students was shadowboxing in a gymnasium in downstate Illinois. One student was struck, and several others were involved in the incident. When the dust settled, only some were disciplined — suspended from school based on video evidence from the building’s surveillance cameras. The parents of the suspended children were alarmed and insisted they had been treated unfairly. They asked to see the video.
They were told no.
The video, they were told, contained images of other students, and sharing it would violate those students’ privacy. The school explained that its hands were tied.
The irony, if it can be called that, is that almost everyone else in the building had already seen it. Teachers had watched it. Staff had watched it. Students themselves had watched it. The footage had circulated throughout the school community with little apparent concern for anyone’s privacy. The only people denied access were the children’s parents.
State Senator Terri Bryant (R-Murphysboro) heard about this case. Then she heard about another. Then another. As reported by The Center Square, Bryant said,
“That is when I started asking around and found out this happens fairly frequently. A student is suspended, there’s video or other evidence, and parents are told they can’t see it.”
Bryant’s response is Senate Bill 2876, introduced in the 104th Illinois General Assembly. The bill is direct in its requirements: if a school district intends to rely on video footage, written statements, incident reports, or any other evidence to support a suspension or expulsion, the student’s parents or guardians must be allowed to review that evidence before the disciplinary hearing.
The bill does not require schools to provide copies of evidence. It does not give parents the right to walk out with a thumb drive or a printed transcript. It requires only that they be permitted to see what is being used against their child — in a controlled setting, under whatever protocols the district deems appropriate to protect against misuse.
“This isn’t just about video,” Bryant said.
“Whatever is being used to discipline a student, parents should be allowed to see it. Access doesn’t mean handing over copies.”
Bryant has been careful to acknowledge the legitimate concerns on the other side. Large districts face real logistical challenges in scheduling controlled viewings before hearings. Some evidence involves sensitive matters — such as sexual misconduct allegations and gang-related incidents — where identifying other students could create retaliation risks. She has indicated openness to adjustments in the bill’s implementation mechanisms.
But on the core principle, she has not wavered. Parents have a right to know what is used to punish their children. The bill, as she frames it, is about restoring that right.
To understand why this matters, consider what it means in practice to challenge a school’s disciplinary decision without access to the underlying evidence.
The parents receive a letter stating that their child has been suspended for five days for fighting. The letter includes a paragraph describing the incident in terms chosen by the administration. Their child insists he defended himself, that he was not the aggressor, or that several other students did the same thing and were not punished. The parents call the school. They ask to see the video. They are told no.
What happens next?
The parents can attend the disciplinary hearing and argue against a factual account they cannot independently verify. They can retain an attorney, if they can afford one, and attempt to obtain the footage through formal records requests, a process that can take weeks and may be contested. They can appeal to the school board after the fact, once the suspension has already been served.
In most cases, they accept the outcome because they see no practical alternative.
Bryant’s bill is a due process measure. It does not prevent schools from suspending students. It does not second-guess administrative judgment. It requires that, before a family is asked to accept or contest a punishment, the school show the parents all the evidence it has used to determine what it says happened.
Here is what makes Senate Bill 2876 remarkable and what has gone almost entirely unreported in coverage of it.
The right that Bryant’s bill proposes to create already exists. It has existed for decades. Illinois school districts that refuse to show parents evidence supporting the discipline imposed are not exercising a legal prerogative. They are violating federal law.
This isn’t a matter of interpretation. It is established by a 1975 Supreme Court ruling, confirmed by a 2017 federal agency guidance letter that reversed prior guidance on the specific question of multi-student surveillance video, affirmed by a Congressional Research Service analysis that concludes federal law cannot be used to deny parents this access without violating the Constitution, and underscored by a formal April 2025 compliance directive from the sitting Secretary of Education.
Taken together, these authorities leave little room to justify current Illinois practices. Any district that is not in compliance is, at best, testing the limits of settled federal law while using the language of student privacy as a cover.
The foundational case is Goss v. Lopez, decided by the United States Supreme Court on January 22, 1975. The case arose from the suspension of nine students at public schools in Columbus, Ohio, each of whom was removed from school without a hearing. The students sued, alleging that their constitutional rights had been violated.
The Supreme Court agreed. In a 5-4 ruling, with the majority opinion authored by Justice Byron R. White, the Court held that students facing suspension from public school have property and liberty interests protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because public school attendance is a right established by state law, the state cannot deprive students of that right without a constitutionally adequate procedure.
The Court was explicit about the requirements. Before a short-term suspension — defined as ten days or fewer — a student must receive oral or written notice of the charges. If the student denies the charges, the school must explain the evidence the authorities have. The student must be allowed to present their side of the story. The Goss opinion requires an explanation of the evidence the authorities have, which, in practice, means schools cannot withhold that evidence while claiming to rely on it for discipline and still satisfy due process.
That was fifty-one years ago. It has been binding constitutional law in every public school in every state in this country ever since. No federal statute is required to activate it. No state enabling legislation is needed.
It applies to Illinois school districts by operation of the United States Constitution.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Goss addressed the constitutional minimum. The specific question of surveillance footage and the privacy of other students captured in it was addressed separately and more recently by the United States Department of Education.
For years, school districts have justified refusing to share discipline videos by citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Enacted in 1974, FERPA protects the privacy of student educational records and generally prohibits schools from disclosing one student’s records to another student’s parents without consent. When a discipline video captures multiple students, districts argue that showing it to any one student’s parents would constitute an impermissible disclosure of the other students’ records.
This argument was plausible enough that the Department of Education’s own prior guidance, in 2003 and 2004, suggested that schools could refuse to share footage if other students could not be redacted from it. Many Illinois districts built their denial policies on this interpretation.
On December 7, 2017, the Department of Education’s Office of the Chief Privacy Officer formally reversed that position.
The guidance arose from a specific case — a hazing incident involving a football team, captured on surveillance cameras maintained by the school administration. The video showed the students who were disciplined, the victims, and the bystanders. The district had refused to share the footage with the parents of the disciplined students because other students were visible in it.
The Chief Privacy Officer disagreed. The guidance letter, known in education law as the Wachter Letter, held that, while the video was indeed an educational record for every student who appeared in it, that fact did not extinguish the parents of the disciplined students’ right to review it.
The letter directed that where footage cannot be segregated or redacted without destroying its meaning, the parents of the disciplined student must be permitted to inspect and review the entire video. The same principle applied to written witness statements. Redact what can be redacted without destroying meaning, such as witness names, but disclose the substance of the evidence.
The Wachter Letter has been federal policy for eight years.
Illinois school districts operating under the old, pre-2017 framework are not following outdated guidance in good faith. They are ignoring a federal reversal that has been in effect for almost a decade.
The Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan analytical arm of the United States Congress, has directly addressed this question in its interpretation of student due process rights in disciplinary proceedings under FERPA.
The conclusion is that FERPA cannot be used to deny parents access to the evidence collected against their minor child in a disciplinary proceeding. To do so would deprive them of their constitutional rights. The Department of Education is precluded from enforcing FERPA in a manner that violates those rights, and it has explicitly stated that it will not interpret FERPA compliance as justifying violations of due process.
The CRS analysis makes clear that FERPA was enacted to protect students and parents — not to give school administrators a tool to insulate their disciplinary decisions from scrutiny. The law’s privacy protections were designed to prevent disclosure of student records to outside parties, not to prevent the subjects of disciplinary proceedings from knowing what evidence is being used to punish them.
If any doubt remained about the current administration’s position on parental access to school records, it was erased on April 28, 2025, when the Department of Education, under Secretary Linda McMahon, issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to every Chief State School Officer and Superintendent in the country. The letter directed all state and local education agencies to demonstrate compliance with FERPA’s parental access requirements by April 30, 2025. Two days.
A two-day window between directive and deadline is not a compliance process. It is a declaration. It signals that the Department of Education regarded non-compliance as a documented condition requiring immediate correction, not a future risk to be gradually remediated.
Secretary McMahon was blunt. Many states and school districts, she wrote, have turned the concept of privacy on its head — prioritizing government officials’ privileges over parents’ rights. The letter ordered schools to allow parents to review all of their children’s education records.
Under FERPA, disciplinary records are explicitly defined as education records. Evidence used to impose discipline — video footage, witness statements, incident reports — becomes part of those education records once the school places it in the student’s file and relies on it to take disciplinary action, as confirmed by the Department of Education’s 2017 Wachter Letter.
Illinois school districts that continue to deny parents access to discipline evidence are not merely defying a half-century of constitutional precedent and eight years of federal agency guidance. As of April 28, 2025, they are in direct defiance of an active, formal directive from the sitting Secretary of Education.
When Senate Bill 2876 was introduced, it generated commentary in Illinois political circles that underscores precisely the problem Bryant’s legislation is attempting to address. On Capitol Fax, the authoritative Illinois political newsletter published by veteran statehouse reporter Rich Miller, a commenter identifying as someone familiar with district legal counsel wrote that the access right the bill proposes is already the law in their district. A Board of Education member agreed, saying the bill had him “scratching his head” because he believed the right already existed.
Miller offered an important clarification: the current Illinois School Code requires only that a suspension notice include a “full statement of the reasons,” language that doesn’t necessarily require production of the actual video or written materials. Even if the constitutional right exists independently, he wrote, codifying it in state statute would spare everyone the cost of litigation to establish it.
What this exchange illustrates is not legal ambiguity. It illustrates a compliance gap. Some Illinois districts, those with legal counsel who carefully read federal guidance and Supreme Court precedent, already provide parents with access to disciplinary evidence. Others do not. The variation is not a function of what the law requires. It is a function of whether the districts have chosen to comply.
With that context established, the significance of Senate Bill 2876 shifts. Bryant’s bill is not a pioneering expansion of parental rights. It is a compliance enforcement mechanism, an attempt to align the Illinois School Code with constitutional and federal requirements that have been in place for decades and are being systematically ignored by school districts across the state.
This reframing is not a criticism of Bryant’s effort. It is, if anything, an argument that the effort is more urgently needed than it might first appear. A state that is out of compliance with a 1975 Supreme Court ruling and a 2017 federal agency reversal of prior guidance is not merely behind the times. It is operating in defiance of settled law, openly defying the constitutional rights of students and parents.
The bill’s controlled-viewing framework — parents may see the evidence but not receive copies — is a reasonable implementation mechanism that addresses legitimate concerns about social media distribution and retaliation while preserving the core access right. Bryant’s acknowledgment that districts may need flexibility on logistics is appropriate. These are implementation details, not objections to the underlying right.
What is not negotiable, under federal law, is the right itself.
Illinois families whose children face suspension or expulsion deserve to know what evidence is being used against them. This should not be controversial or partisan. It is the constitutional minimum.
Yet it has not been followed in Illinois.
Senate Bill 2876 would codify in plain statutory language what the law has required all along. It would end the variation between districts whose legal counsel read federal guidance carefully and those whose counsel do not — or do but choose to ignore it. It would give parents a clear, enforceable right they can point to without retaining an attorney or filing a federal complaint.
The Illinois General Assembly should pass this bill. Not because it would create something new, but because it would make explicit in the law of this state something that has been true for fifty years — and that too many Illinois school districts have spent those fifty years pretending does not apply to them.
Terri Bryant is right that parents should be able to see the evidence used to discipline their children. The Supreme Court agreed with her in 1975. The Department of Education agreed with her in 2017. The Congressional Research Service agrees with her today. The Secretary of Education ordered it in 2025.
Illinois should catch up.
