Senate to Vote on Change In Files Law Procedure

The U.S. Senate will vote today on an amendment that would exempt letters of recommendation written before the end of this year from the federal law giving students access to their files.

Staff aides for the co-sponsors of the amendment--Senators James L. Buckley (R-N.Y.) and Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.)-- finished drafting the amendment's final wording in a late-afternoon session yesterday. The senators expect easy passage of the amendment, which will be attached as a rider to a catch-all education bill, spokesmen said.

The agreement on a final draft concluded four weeks of negotiations between the staffs of Buckley, the sponsor of the original files law, and Pell, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee of Education, and will enable the senators to put the changes to a floor vote before Congress recesses.

A spokesman for the Senate sub-committee said that the amendment "will be voted on in a block" with other riders to be attached to Senate-Joint Resolution 40, a bill establishing a White House conference on Libraries that passed the House of Representatives last night.

Sent to Committee

The block of riders, if passed, will then be sent to a special joint Congressional Conference on Education--with its chairman, Rep. Carl Perkins (D-Ky.) appointing the members.

Steven Wexler, chief counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on Education and the lawyer who helped the Buckley and Pell aides hammer out their agreement on the amendment, said last night that the amendment would:

* Designate December 31, 1974, as the last day letters of recommendation can be written and withheld from student scrutiny; all letters written after that date become subject to inspection upon student request;

* Allow students to waive their right to review their records, permitting letters of recommendation written prior to the new cut-off date to remain in the files;

* Give parents supporting children in college the right to see the grades of those children; and,

* Prevent students from seeing parents' confidential income statements used in determining scholarships.

Staff attorneys for the Children's Defense Fund--a group that lobbied for the Buckley law and has opposed Pell's attempts to amend it--said yesterday that "Wexler's draft" has "undercut" and "screwed over" the original student files law in an effort to "kowtow to places like Harvard."