Infinite Campus and the ACLU

MCLU Issues Back-to-School Privacy Alert

August 20, 2009

The Maine Civil Liberties Union Foundation says students and parents do not have to provide social security numbers to public schools when asked.

A Maine law passed this spring, An Act To Improve the Ability of the Department of Education To Conduct Longitudinal Data Studies, allows the Maine Department of Education to collect and use students’ social security numbers for tracking performance before and after graduation. The database is intended to link student information between the Maine Department of Education and Maine Department of Labor.

An important provision of the law establishes an opt-in program. Under the opt-in program, parents are not required to provide social security numbers to schools, but rather they may choose to participate. In 1974, Congress passed the Privacy Act (Public Law 93-579), finding that the right to privacy is a personal and fundamental right protected by the US Constitution and when government agencies collect, use, and disseminate private information, privacy is put at risk. In accordance with these findings, LD 1356 specifies that school administrations must notify parents that providing private information, such as students’ social security numbers, is optional.

“The right to privacy is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution,” said Shenna Bellows, Executive Director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union Foundation. “In the interest of student privacy and to remain compliant with the law, schools must inform parents that this is an opt-in system. Parents do not have to provide private sensitive information about their children.”

The debate over LD 1356 was heated. Proponent Commissioner Susan Gendron said in her testimony that tracking data using social security numbers is “essential for evaluating the effectiveness of education programs and curriculum in impacting postsecondary and labor market outcomes.”

Opponents, including teachers, superintendents, parents and advocacy groups, highlighted the privacy risks with tracking student and worker data using social security numbers. Government agencies are not immune to security breaches. In 2006, the Veteran’s Affairs Administration was blamed for the theft of 26.5 million social security numbers when a disc containing sensitive information was stolen. Breach of information like the social security number would leave students vulnerable to identity theft or worse. Parents and students noted how tracking student data, including incidents of prohibited behavior, with a social security number could have a negative effect, as Congress noted, on students’ ability to obtain housing, employment, or credit. Noting these concerns, schools must ask parents to think long and hard before handing over children’s social security numbers.

“I work with students every day and support their right to succeed,” said Scott McFarland, principal at Mt. Desert Elementary School. “Attaching a 7-year-old’s achievement and discipline information to his social security number is an unfair and unjust violation of her privacy. We need to be advocates for children in a way that will protect their right to privacy and the unnecessary sharing of privileged information. I would encourage all administrators in Maine to let parents know they don’t have to put their children’s privacy at risk like this.”

“Every parent must know this is an opt-in program,” said Brianna Twofoot, Field Organizer for the Maine Civil Liberties Union Foundation. “The onus lies with the schools to disseminate accurate information about the program and ensure Maine students’ privacy is protected.”

LINK: http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/mclu-issues-back-school-privacy-alert

Data Collection Sparks Privacy Concerns

Data Collection Sparks Privacy Concerns MT Public Schools

February 10, 2009 · 1 Comment

February 9, 2009
Data collection sparks privacy concerns

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090209/NEWS01/902090302&template=printart

By ERIC NEWHOUSE
Tribune Projects Editor

Montana’s Office of Public Instruction has begun collecting information – including medical data – on students with disabilities, raising some confidentiality concerns among school officials.

“I don’t have any problem submitting this data to the state, but it’s wrong to associate it with an individual student by name,” said Doug Sullivan, superintendent of schools in Sidney.

In addition to a list of the physical and emotional disabilities students have, Sullivan also is concerned that the state requires general income information by asking which students are eligible for a subsidized school lunch, Sullivan said.

“I asked the principal not to disclose some of that specific information about my son, but he told me that could jeopardize federal funding of school programs,” Sullivan said. “But that jeopardizes my right as a parent to control information about my own child.”

Madalyn Quinlan, chief of staff for OPI, said the data is required by the Achievement in Montana system, which is used to assess and track the educational progress of students.

“It’s an accountability requirement for the federal government to ensure we are providing services to the students they’re providing funding for,” said Great Falls Public Schools Superintendent Cheryl Crawley. She said the system’s current security provisions appear adequate to her and her staff.

The program, which collects 108 data sets on each child, is in the fourth year of a five-year contract with the software vendor, Infinite Campus Inc.

“The system for the special education program is just being rolled out this year,” said Bob Runkel, assistant superintendent of OPI.

Information in that system includes individual education programs, in which teachers devise strategies to educate students with a variety of physical, mental and emotional disabilities.

“My point is that that information doesn’t belong to the state, at least not on a personal identification basis, particularly in a state that has so strongly rejected the Real ID program (a national program of standardized identification),” Sullivan said.

Runkel said school officials are sensitive to those concerns.

“Of course we’re concerned,” he said. “We’ve developed a system, keeping privacy and confidentiality of student data in mind, and it has a lot of safeguards built into it.”

“The product itself is actually stored with the state (online) firewall,” Quinlan said. “Any information uploaded from the school districts comes across a secure site, and no information is exchanged via e-mail.”

Additionally, all OPI employees are trained on student confidentiality procedures, she said.

Those measures aren’t enough, according to Sullivan and the board of trustees of the Sidney Public Schools.

Sullivan said he wonders why OPI can’t generate a student identification number and send it to the district, which will then assign it to a student. Once that is done, the district and OPI could refer to that student by the number, with only the district having access to the name assigned to the ID number.

“The (software) product we purchased has the student name as an integral part of the program,” Quinlan said. “And the student name helps us when we deal with the local school district.”

Even if an ID number is created, the information could still be exposed at the district level, said Glynn Ligon of ESP Solutions Inc., a consulting firm in Austin, Texas, that bills itself as specialists in K-12 data systems.

“I personally think the ruse of getting only the ID number goes only so far in protecting the student’s identity, because it still creates a unique record that is linked back to a personally identifiable record at the local level – and possibly elsewhere,” he said. “Plus, within the record itself, there will be, at times, data or combinations of data that uniquely identify individuals.”

Barbara Clements of ESP Solutions added that system hackers tend to be more successful on a local level.

“Frankly, I haven’t heard of any hackers getting into student records at the state level. They are usually high-school students wanting to change a grade, and they are more likely to go after school district systems,” she said. “There is nothing, really, to gain from state records, which contain only a small portion of what is kept at the local level.”

Clements said that other states’ education departments have adopted different strategies to protect student privacy.

“In some states we have worked with, there was concern about collecting the student name,” Clements said. “Those states have generally either collected the student records without the student name or stripped the name of the record when the data are entered into a data warehouse.

“The name is important to ensure that the student identifier is correct,” she added. “Once that check is done, the name is not really needed at the state level. “

It can be a delicate balancing act to meet all the legal requirements and ensure security.

“Many states have collected records … over the years – without the student’s name,” Ligon said. “The real solution is to have a solid, legal, defensible data access and management policy that complies with FERPA (the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act), HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which provides for patient privacy), and your state laws, and allows local policies to be adopted that are consistent.”

OPI officials are beginning to revisit the issue as the current software contract, which calls for the state to pay $435,000 annually, nears the end of its terms.

“We’re doing some research now on what other states with a longer track record have been doing to keep student names separate from ID numbers and accompanying information,” Quinlan said. “There is some precedent for it nationally.”

Additional Facts
Hearing
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Senate Bill 338, which would protect information and court records relating to children with disabilities, at 9 a.m. Tuesday in room 303 of the state Capitol in Helena.

Link: http://axiomamuse.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/data-collection-sparks-privacy-concerns-mt-public-schools/

Student Privacy at Risk?

Student privacy bill spurs debate in Augusta

By Mal Leary
Capitol News Service

AUGUSTA, Maine — Students, parents and school administrators all told lawmakers the Department of Education should stop collecting the names of students disciplined by schools and keeping them in a database, but Commissioner Susan Gendron warned that could jeopardize all federal funds for education that come to the state.

“If we don’t comply with reporting requirements as the federal government specifies, we can in fact be required to return all and any federal dollars,” she told lawmakers. “IDEA [Individuals with Educational Disabilities Act] alone is $50 million a year.”

Gendron said that while the state is collecting the disciplinary information, it reports the information only as aggregate data without the students’ identification numbers. She said individual data are confidential by law and protected from release.

“The DOE has no compelling need to know this information that would override the rights of our students and their families,” said Patricia Hopkins, superintendent of Camden area schools. “The DOE has a data collection concern that it has chosen to solve at the expense of student privacy instead of protecting that privacy.”

She and other speakers argued there is no assurance that the department can keep the information confidential once it is collected. She said there have been frequent and well-publicized reports of data breaches at major corporations and at the federal government.

“They are trying to put a lot of security measures on this but even with the top security on this information it can still be accessed, it can still be breached,” said Jason Hamilton, a senior at Hampden Academy. “I just don’t think this is right.”

He said it does not seem fair that if he committed a crime as a juvenile, that record is not kept after he turns 18, but a record of a suspension for a playground fight in elementary school would be in a Department of Education database. He was one of several students testifying in support of banning the collection of names as part of the Department of Education database.

“The simplest terms I can put this in is when I had to set down and make a decision about putting students’ names in, it just felt dirty to me,” said Scott McFarland, principal of Mount Desert Elementary School in Northeast Harbor. “This just stinks, it is not right and it is not acceptable to me.”

The Maine School Management Association and the Maine School Boards Association also supported the measure.

Commissioner Gendron, the only opponent to the bill, defended the collection of the information as required by several federal laws, but her assertion was challenged by Jon Paterson, a Portland attorney representing the Maine Civil Liberties Union at the hearing.

“In my personal review of the federal laws that were cited by the department, there is no requirement in any of these federal laws that requires the Department of Education to collect that information,” he said.

In fact, Paterson said, some of the federal laws cited by department, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, specifically prohibit collection of information that names an individual.

“It says that reporting schools shall not identify victims of crimes or persons accused of crimes,” he said. “In the Individuals with Educational Disabilities Act, the state is prohibited from collecting information that would disclose personally identifiable information about individual children.”

The measure is sponsored by Sen. Justin Alfond, D-Portland, co-chair of the committee. The bill now will be considered at a workshop of the committee, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The bill then will go before the full Legislature with the recommendation of the panel whether it should be passed or needs to be amended.

Link: http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/103236.html

Infinite Campus Student Software Security Issue?

Student changes grades in a school’s computers

The Courier-Journal is reporting on a student who is being denied access to her graduation ceremonyafter she conspired with another student to change grades in the Jeffersonville High School’s computer system.

While this incident apparently took place up in Indiana, it provides another case in point that some students will work very hard to compromise computer systems – especially those that have things like their grades in them – and there is a history of students sometimes succeeding.

We need to insure that Kentucky’s new Infinite Campus computer system, which now tracks student grades here, is more robust than the system used in Clark County, Indiana. Infinite Campus holds a lot more sensitive information besides just student grades, and a compromise could have serious consequences for parents as well as their student children.

(Corrects earlier version of this post which assumed the high school in question was in Kentucky as the Courier article did not identify the state where the school is located)