State Representative Gail Lavielle (R-143), Ranking Member of the General Assembly’s Education Committee, applauded the Committee’s passage on March 27 of a bill that would protect the privacy of K-12 student data. A staunch advocate of protecting the privacy of student information, Lavielle had introduced a concept bill on the subject (HB 5991) early in the session, and the Committee’s co-chairs agreed to raise a committee bill based on the concept, indicating a strong signal of bipartisan support. The committee bill, HB 7017, An Act Concerning Student Data Privacy, drew the unanimous vote of the Education Committee’s membership.
“Parents from around our district and the state have told me that they are very worried about how their children are being tracked in school,” Rep. Lavielle said. “They want to make sure that personally identifiable information about their children is not being obtained without their knowledge or improperly used by third parties. This bill will go a long way toward protecting the privacy of academic, behavioral, and other personal student information that should be used only for educational purposes.”
Rep. Lavielle noted that parents’ concerns have been exacerbated by the rapid development of technology and the increasingly widespread use by public schools and education systems of third-party providers for collecting and analyzing student information.
HB 7017 covers several key areas:
- It requires all contracts between the state Department of Education and state or local boards of education and providers of educational software or data services to specify clearly that student records must not be used for anything other than educational purposes. The contracts must also include descriptions of security and notification measures that the providers must respect.
- It prohibits third-party operators of online or Internet services from selling personally identifiable student data, from disclosing it to other third parties, and from using it for advertising purposes or for creating individual student profiles.
- It requires third-party providers to report any breach of student data security within 48 hours.
- It allows a local or regional board of education to refuse to grant any request by a person or an organization for student directory information if it determines that the request is not related to school purposes.
“While data collection is useful for measuring the effectiveness of our education system, it must never threaten the privacy of our students,” Rep. Lavielle said. “If this bill becomes law, it will make Connecticut’s laws protecting personal student information stronger than those of most other states. I want to thank the Education Committee chairs for their support of these measures, and I hope that the bill’s bipartisan support will lead to its passage by the full legislature in the next few weeks.”
The bill is expected to move forward for consideration by the full House and Senate. The 2015 legislative session will conclude on June 3.