Superintendent: Map Showing Location of Special Education Students Released Mistakenly

Editor's note: Updated at 4:38 p.m. with a PDF document from Superintendent Kathleen Bodie (attached to the right of this article).

Arlington’s schools superintendent said Friday afternoon that a map containing approximate address information of special education students was released mistakenly.

The map comes from a Tuesday meeting of the Redistricting Committee, which is charged with figuring out new boundaries for individual districts to alleviate overcrowding at some schools.

At the meeting, committee members were given black-and-white copies of several maps. One of them contained dots showing the locations of students, including one that showed where special education and non-special education students live.

The locations were unclear on the black-and-white map distributed to committee members but visible on a color copy released to at least one Arlington news outlet.

“This map should not have gone out the way it did,” Superintendent Kathleen Bodie said in a phone interview. “It shouldn’t have had the designation on the map. That was a mistake, which I felt terrible about.”

The draft map has sparked the curiosity of several parents, at least dozens of whom asked Arlington Patch to obtain a copy of the document.

Patch made several requests for a copy of the map on Thursday. On Friday morning, the superintendent’s office provided Patch with a package similar to the one distributed at the Redistricting Committee meeting.

In that copy, which was black-and-white, it was unclear what dots on the map referred to special education or non-special education students.

A color copy of the map was published for a few hours on the news site YourArlington.com. Site publisher Bob Sprague later wrote he removed the map “because it showed identifying information about special-education students.”

At least one parent called out schools officials for releasing the map.

“This is an outrageous and gross breach of confidentiality and is completely unnecessary information to make publicly available—why not merely list the number of special ed students in each proposed district instead, without showing where each of them lives?” wrote one parent in an email to Bodie and the School Committee.

The parent, who asked to not be identified for this article, asked officials to prepare a revised version of the map that does not reveal what students are in a special education program.

“Your disregard for the right to privacy and confidentiality of the special ed students who live in Arlington is an embarrassment, frankly,” the parent continued. “I hope you will endeavor to better protect the rights of some of Arlington’s more vulnerable residents in the future.”

Bodie said a revised map containing no identifying information will be posted on Arlington Public Schools' website.