Restrict Editing of Counseling Notes (CNF) to the Authoring User
Counseling notes are a first-person clinical narrative — the counselor's own observation and account of a session with a student. Their value as a record depends on remaining exactly as the author wrote them.
Currently, any user with update/edit/delete rights to the Counseling Notes table (CNF) can modify the comment/narrative field on a note authored by someone else. There is no authorship lock.
This creates real exposure for districts:
Record integrity — a note that anyone could have rewritten is no longer an accurate account of what the author documented.
Legal risk — counseling notes surface in records requests, IEP/504 disputes, threat assessments, Title IX matters, and litigation. Unattributable records are far harder to defend.
Confidentiality — broad edit rights work against FERPA's legitimate-educational-interest principle and the trust students place in counseling staff.
Professional standards — counselors, psychologists, and social workers are ethically required to keep their documentation their own.
Requested change: Lock the narrative/comment field on a CNF record to the user who created it. Anyone else needing to add information should create a new note, preserving the original and a clear chain of authorship.
Quyen Nguyen
shared this idea
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Teresa Bierbaum
commented
As a high school counselor, I need to know that the notes I write are going to remain in tact, SAFE and someone can't delete or alter them. If this isn't changed, it makes the notes area not safe and will force us to use an alternate system.
