Should I discuss a student's circulation activity or fines/fees with anyone except the student themself?
Answer
Short answer: No.
A student's circulation records, including fines/fee records, are generally considered education records, and are therefore covered by FERPA, which with a few exceptions prohibits disclosing education records to anyone but the individual the record refers to.
This means that if a student's parents or anyone else contacts the library with a request for information regarding the student's circulation activity, we should refuse to provide that information. Instead, the student can retrieve that information independently or by contacting the library and provide it to the other person. Students enrolled in the current term can get this information using the account area of OneSearch. Students not currently enrolled can contact their library's Circulation Desk, and staff can retrieve the information via Alma, and generate an Activity Report if appropriate.
Note that the above applies not only to adults but also to minors who are enrolled in LRCCD courses.
Sharing information inside LRCCD
FERPA generally allows the sharing of education records within the institution among people with a need to know. Most of our libraries interpret this need to know fairly narrowly, to include only library personnel. For instance, if an instructor requests information on which students have a particular reserve text checked out, we would refuse to provide that information. In this case the FERPA situation is a gray area, assuming that the instructor would treat the information as confidential. But our library "freedom to read" ethics weigh against sharing circulation activity except where absolutely necessary. There is no need for an instructor to know which students have a text checked out, since the library is able to communicate with the student if, for instance, an item falls overdue. And we want to avoid situations in which students see their circulation activity as unacceptably open information, even within the institution, or instances where a student feels singled out in their class simply because they used library resources.
If LRCCD student- or academic-support personnel (such as a Counselor) contacts the library with a request for this sort of information, it is best again to urge the student themselves to get the information and share it with the other LRCCD personnel. We can of course explain in general what kinds of issues students encounter with overdues, fees etc. If libraries feel they need to make exceptions, they should discuss these issues as a library and document their local standards.
We might share certain kinds of circulation activity for particular, closely circumscribed purposes. For instance, we might supply our research offices with un-anonymized circulation data in order to discover aggregate demographic characteristics of library users. Or we might have arrangements connected to certain materials purchased with categorical funding that requires reporting of un-anonymized users. These exceptional situations should be carefully considered by the library and the library should receive assurances from any third party that the user data is being considered confidential.