On July 29, 2024, a person outside of the Highline School District, with no affiliation or contracts with the school, sent a series of emails showing that Highline’s Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Director Melissa Pointer had been sharing personal and private student/family/teacher communications with an outside-of-Highline third party.
Burien.News is in possession of several emails (from an anonymous source) that were forwarded to the Highline Board of Directors and the superintendent on that date.
From the email content, it appears that Ms. Pointer skirted the normal, trackable Highline email channels by forwarding emails to her personal email, then sent the emails to the third party.
Similar to HIPAA in healthcare, FERPA is a federal law that protects families and their children’s education records; it comprises three regulatory components:
1) Rights to access records,
2) Rights to amend records,
3) Rights to have some control over the disclosure of personally identifiable information.
The FERPA statute is found at 20 U.S.C. § 1232g and the FERPA regulations are found at 34 CFR Part 99.
In potential violation of FERPA law, the emails included personal details about students, family members, and school staff, and based on the content, the people affected were unaware of Ms. Pointer’s private sidebar discussions.
While Pointer was Principal at Marvista, one of the emails she sent on Thursday, May 24, 2018, shows that she did not want the district employee to know they were being discussed:
“Please don’t tell [Highline employee] I forwarded this to you. I just wanted you to have an FYI in case…”
Pointer did not redact email addresses or communications between Highline employees, parents, or student names.
Burien.News became aware of this possible infraction from a Twitter(X) post, dated 7/31/24 and reposted 8/28/24:
anti-racistSEL @antiracistSEL · 10h (8/28/24)
@HighlineSchools #highlinepublicschools
@antiracistSEL· Jul 31
“Fascinating how systemic white supremacy works, huh @ijduran? Wonder if you had a Black SEL director who had committed dozens of #FERPA violations and made racist remarks, if you’d sink resources into protecting and covering up for them? @waOSPI @chrisreykdal @dahliabazzaz”
Based on the information in the 8/28/24 Twitter (X) post, we reached out to the following people:
- Highline School Board of Directors
- Superintendent Ivan Duran
- Highline Communications, Tove Tupper
- SEL Director Melissa Pointer
- Person who sent emails to the District on July 29, 2024
At the time of the publishing, we have not received any comments from the District or anyone else.
It is unclear how (or if) the Highline District has addressed these allegations regarding SEL Director Pointer. We also do not know if the District has contacted the affected parties to give them the opportunity to report their concerns to the Dept. of Education.
Burien.News will continue to update as we learn more.
