If a High School Senior Displays a Swastika at his School, Should Colleges be Told?

[cobrat]

Do they have the right to divulge disciplinary issues in a letter or directly? Maybe no.

I disagree here. If teachers/LOR writers can’t divulge disciplinary issues s/he’s aware of them, one of the key purposes of having LORs…along with HSs maintaining disciplinary records or guidance counselor reports would be fatally undermined.

My takeaway from this is that any teacher agreeing to write a LOR should make it clear that they reserve the right to rescind it and to tell the college exactly why they did so. If the kid doesn’t like that, he can find somebody else to write it.

@Hunt

Unless this school’s college guidance office/admins were being exceedingly remiss in instructing their students in how LORs work, teachers making it clear they reserve the right to rescind LORs and tell colleges why they did so shouldn’t be necessary.

The college guidance office/admins should have made that amply clear from the beginning of 9th grade onwards and reinforce that point during the rest of the students’ time in HS.

If a HS student is still unaware of this by late junior/senior year, either s/he wasn’t paying attention and/or the school admins were exceedingly remiss in their instructional duties.

That seems like her error. Kid wouldn’t have known otherwise, having presumably signed the standard rec letter waiver.

Disagree here for two reasons.

1. Students/parents should know so they are put on notice about possible negative behaviors/actions which caused the rescinding and 2. So student whose LOR got rescinded has a chance to seek out another LOR writer if there's still time.
   

And even with #2, LOR writers don’t always feel obligated to notify students of rescinding of LORs in time. The older college classmate who had 2 LORs rescinded by Profs in his MA program due to their subsequently finding out about negative classroom behavior from another Prof rescinded their LORs right in the middle of PhD applications which directly caused him to be rejected by several PhD programs.

And according to mutual friends of ours who knew of the circumstances much more closely than I did…there’s not much sympathy for said older classmate as the rescinding of those LORs…like what happened with the student in OP was a direct consequence of negative behaviors…and the HS student’s behavior is much more egregious than my older college classmate’s.