$75 charge to provide a kindergarten report card
Hello All!
I am wondering if anyone else has run across this. I am applying to a private school. They asked for my child’s kindergarten report card. I could have emailed it directly but her previous school never gave us one. When I asked the Montessori school they first supplied a blank report card and said it was finished. Then it took me a week and a half to try to ask them to just send the school we are applying to or myself a copy of her report card. At that point the school owner said her file had been lost and normally they do not charge, but it took time to locate so I needed to pay $75. This seems like a lot. It’s more than it would cost for me to get a full college transcript. Have you been charged? How much? Or do you own or work in a school? Does this seem normal?
thank you!
confused mom
Parent Replies
Not only is this very not standard practice (no schools below college charge for sending transcripts), it's illogical. You're not asking for extra work, you're asking for a service they provide with your usual tuition payment. The fact that they've made extra work for themselves by losing something is irrelevant and certainly not something you owe them money for.
But I'm not sure where that leaves you, since you need something they have...
Wow! That’s a lot of money. We’re not there but have experienced some nickel and diming from our childcare provider: it wasn’t that fees were assessed but how much they were, as if they are counting on that as an additional revenue stream.
I think that sounds ridiculous. If they normally don't charge and it is not your fault that they lost the records, then you should not have to pay. I understand if they charge you a handling fee for the time required to generate and send the report, but that should be like $15, definitely not $75.
The Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act says that a school can charge a fee for copying records (as long as that fee doesn't prevent you from accessing them) BUT cannot charge a fee to search for or retrieve records (https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/ferpa#0.1_se34.1.99_111). It sounds like they're charging you a fee to search for the records they lost, so you're right that it sounds fishy. FERPA only applies to schools that receive federal funding, though, so if this school doesn't, then they may be able to do whatever they want.
This is crazy - no you should not have to pay for them losing the report card. The fee was never discussed or agreed to. I'm worried about a school that writes report cards for kindergarteners & a school that requires them for 1st graders. All ridiculous.
It is pretty standard for schools you are applying to beyond kindergarten (both public and private) to ask for academic records from the previous school, so I don't find that part crazy. But no, you should definitely not have to pay! The fact that this is a Montessori school and that you never received a report card makes me wonder if maybe they don't typically do report cards, and they're not actually charging you for searching for it, but for completing it. If that's the case, they should have said so (and I suspect the school you're applying to would have been just fine with that for a kindergartener, assuming the recommendation forms were otherwise complete). In your shoes, I'd politely decline to pay and just point out that you should have received it at the time, and they did not send it. Whether that's because they never prepared it in the first place or did but then failed to send it to you and lost it, that's on them.