TO THE ADMINISTRATOR ADDRESSED:
SUBJECT: Staff and Student Record Confidentiality and Security
The Public Education Information Management System database of information about Texas schools is considered one of the richest educational databases in the country, and you may receive requests for this data for research purposes. Much of this data, including financial and organizational data, is not confidential, and may be released to outside entities. However, other parts of this data are confidential, and may not be released except under certain specific conditions.
Staff data, at the individual level, is generally non-confidential except for social security number and date of birth. Student-level data is highly confidential, and is protected by FERPA, the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act of 1974. There are exceptions under FERPA that allow confidential student data to be released to individuals in certain types of organizations for specific reasons. The Texas Education Agency, however, does not provide confidential student data directly to organizations or consultants; it is the decision of the school district whether or not to release this information.
If you contract with an organization to analyze your confidential data, or to provide some other service involving your data, it is of the utmost importance that you have a confidentiality agreement between the organization and your district. This agreement should state exactly who will be using the data and how they plan to use it, where they will physically store it, how they will keep it secure, and how they will return or destroy the data when they have finished the project.
In other cases, when access to confidential information cannot be justified, data may be shared with external organizations as long as the data is prepared in such a way that individual students cannot be identified. This means that you must exclude student-identifiable fields such as name, social security number, and date of birth.
In addition, if there are other attributes that make it possible to identify a student within a group, those attributes must be masked so that any given student cannot and will not be identified. For example, if there are 1 or 2 Native American students in a grade on a particular campus, those students' ethnicity codes should be masked so the students cannot be identified.
For more information on FERPA and student record confidentiality, please visit the TEA web site at WWW.TEA.STATE.TX.US. From the Home page, choose School Data, and then choose Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act Guide.
In addition, you should exercise extreme caution when sending any kind of confidential information over the Internet if you are not using secure lines or encryption software. Encryption software prohibits unauthorized parties from being able to view data should the files be intercepted between sender and destination. Email, in particular, has not been proven to be a safe avenue for transporting confidential data. When in doubt, files containing confidential information should be stored on diskette, CD-ROM, or some other type of electronic media, and then mailed or delivered to the recipient.
Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or would like to discuss these topics in more detail. I can be reached by telephone at (512) 475-2085, and my email address is ntaylor@tea.state.tx.us.
Sincerely,
Nina Taylor
Division Director, Customer Assistance & Training
For further information on this topic, contact Customer Assistance & Training at (512) 475-2085