Restricts the distribution of students' personally identifying information and directs the commissioner of education to develop appropriate regulations regarding permitted disclosure of such information

1 Co-sponsor

• Velmanette Montgomery

Title of bill

An act to amend the education law, in relation to restricting the distribution of students' personally identifying information and directing the commissioner of the department of education to develop appropriate regulations regarding permitted disclosure of such information

Summary of provisions

Section One of the bill amends a new section 2-e to the education law.

No public elementary or secondary school or college or charter school shall sell or otherwise release personally identifying information regarding any student to any third party.

Every student shall be assigned a unique identification number by use of which student's information and individual reports may be accessed by the student's school administrators, guidance counselors and teachers and by the student's parents.

The provisions of this section shall not prohibit the use of the school district or the state of unidentified aggregate data for the purpose of tracking school attendance, curriculum tracking and overall student progress, and for the application or qualification for federal funds.

Section Two states that the commissioner of the department of education is authorized and directed to promulgate all rules, regulations and guidelines he or she deems necessary to allow parents or guardians to consent to the disclosure or their child's information to private third parties and to implement the provisions of this act on or before the effective date.

Justification

Many public school parents have raised concerns about the New York State Education Department's (NYSED) plans to share confidential student information with the non-profit corporation in Bloom Inc., with which the agency contracted to provide a cloud-based K-12 student database A March 3, 2013 Reuters article about the database noted that that for-profit tech companies and other commercial vendors could have access to this data, and that the company's own privacy policy states that it "cannot guarantee the security of the information stored or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted."

While there are potential benefits of integrating technological advances into all facets of education, our State must not proceed with any initiatives, however well-intentioned, that could compromise the privacy of our public school students and their families.

This legislation mandates that any student data shared by a public elementary or secondary school, college or charter school, with a third party be stripped of personally identifying information, including students' names, addresses and social security numbers and instead use unique identifiers known by each student's school administrators, guidance counselors, teachers and parents.

Without identifying information, the data provided to a third party would be worthless for marketing purposes and student privacy would be protected should the data be compromised. However, aggregate data could still be used by districts to apply for Race to the Top Funding, do curriculum evaluation, report attendance, etc.; and schools and parents would be able to pull individual student records using the

unique identifiers to track performance, maintain course schedules and report cards, etc.

Legislative history

S.4569 of 2013-2014 (Hoylman): Died in Education

Fiscal implications

Minimal

Effective date

This act shall take effect on the first of July next succeeding the date upon which it shall have become a law and shall apply to all school years commencing on or after such date.