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PARKERSBURG -- A judge has granted a motion allowing the receivership handling the property of the shuttered Ohio Valley University to release student transcripts.
Some students have been unable to get copies of their transcripts since the board of directors decided to close the private, Church of Christ-affiliated school in December amid mounting debt and questions over its ability to continue conferring degrees.
Claims made online suggested the records had been deleted from the server, but Martin Sheehan, an attorney representing the trust winding up the school's operations, said that was not true.
In September, the receivership maintaining the school's property on behalf of bondholders filed a motion in Wood County Circuit Court seeking to abandon its claim on the records. Because the defunct school could have withheld such documents from students who owed the school money, the rights to them had to be formally relinquished since one of the responsibilities of the receivership is collecting any money due to the institution.
The order from Circuit Judge J.D. Beane was filed last week and says all paper records stored in 30 file cabinets in locked offices on OVU's former campus and all available digital files are to be transferred to the Ohio Valley University Windup Trust.
Sheehan, who could not immediately be reached for comment, has previously said the trust intends to place the records with another institution of higher learning to eventually distribute the transcripts.