Since the passage of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) regulating of the maintenance and dissemination of educational records, educators have struggled to meet federal compliance requirements while operating in the daily realities of public schools. Such practices as determining whether a child's cumulative file could be accessed, by whom, and for what purposes suddenly became a matter of federal law. Legal compliance became more elusive in the late 1990's and i...