Student data privacy, engineered

In short

What FERPA, COPPA and GDPR for minors actually do to an architecture — which records may reach a model at all, who can see what, how long anything is kept, and what a school's security review will make you prove.

5 pages

definitions

A student data privacy agreement, read as an engineering specificationSchools bind vendors with a standard agreement plus an exhibit naming every data element collected. Five of its clauses are build work, and the exhibit is a schema diff in disguise.definition6 min
Directory information is a per-student flag your code has to honourSchools designate their own directory information list, and any family can opt out mid-year. That makes it a dated per-student flag every outbound surface reads at render time.definition6 min
The school official exception, and what it obliges a vendor to buildA vendor holding student records stands inside the school's own permission, not outside FERPA. Each condition of that permission converts into something you build and evidence.definition6 min
Verifiable parental consent, and when the school can give it insteadUnder COPPA, consent must be obtained by a method reasonably likely to prove it came from a parent. Schools can stand in for parents in narrow classroom cases, and the deliverable is a consent record.definition6 min
Where the education record starts and stops, in the schemaThe education record is not a system boundary you can draw around one database. It is a property of fields, which is why transcripts, prompt logs, error payloads and backups keep landing inside it.definition8 min

Working on something in this space?

Tell us where you are in a sentence or two. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right team, and what a sensible first slice of the work looks like.

Start the conversation