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
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