Wednesday, August 27, 2008
At the direction of the Office of the Provost, all University departments have adopted comprehensive policies in the last year dealing with the disposal of paper documents and electronic data that contain sensitive personal information on students, including names, grades and student identification numbers.
The new policies, which includes a revised privacy policy and a new e-data disposal policy, were in part a response to an incident in September 2007, when documents containing sensitive student data, apparently discovered behind Snow Hall, were anonymously delivered to three newspapers, including the University Daily Kansan. The documents, which belonged to the department of mathematics, had not been properly disposed of or shredded.
“In that particular instance, they really just didn’t have good office procedures on what to do once you’re removing data from files,” said Jane Rosenthal, University Privacy Officer.
“It was a failure to have a good, everyday practice in place,” said Rosenthal.
Gloria Prothe, an administrative professional in the mathematics department who was implicated in an unsigned letter that accompanied the documents sent to the Kansan, disagreed with that assessment.
“We always had a policy, it just wasn’t written down. People were sent e-mails and told verbally, and we did have a shredding machine that people were supposed to shred documents into,” Prothe said. “Now we have a several-pages-long departmental policy on record retention and disposal of private information.”
Subsequent to an investigation by the University into the matter of the documents last October, a written disciplinary form was attached to her employee file, and Prothe was placed on one-year probation.
Like many departments, the department of mathematics has ceased its use of shredding machines in favor of using Iron Mountain, the sole vendor approved for the disposal of sensitive documents. According to Jack Martin, deputy director of University Relations, 57 departments at the University contracted with Iron Mountain in fiscal year 2008, with expenditures for the service totaling almost $26,000. The number of departments using the service more than doubled since the previous fiscal year, when only 26 departments participated.
Sensitive documents are collected in secure bins placed throughout academic departments. Both the number of bins and their size are tailored to the needs of the department. While the mathematics department, which offers more than 30 separate courses, uses 14 bins, the department’s neighbor on the fourth floor of Snow Hall, the department of economics, uses only three.
Michelle Huslig-Lawrence, an administrative associate with the department of economics, said that use of a contractor was a practical alternative to manual shredding. Huslig-Lawrence said it took three days alone just to dispose of the sensitive paper waste produced by Economics 104 in one semester.
“It’s a lot of man-hours for me to stand there and shred things,” Huslig-Lawrence said. “This is, time wise, easier for us, and it’s about the same amount of money we’d be spending shredding the stuff ourselves anyways, because we’d have to buy supplies and the oil, and everything else to keep our stuff working properly.”
— — Edited By Scott Toland
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