How IT Can Help Schools Meet FERPA and PPRA
Managing IT for schools or districts has become more complex due to digitization, AI integration, and cyberattacks. These factors add new demands on already overwhelmed IT departments. Unfortunately, ransomware has made headlines for far too many schools.
Congress enacted the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and Section 504 in 1974. both have been updated to also cover digital technologies. State mandates requiring all communications in different languages increase instances of unprotected data in schools or districts.
You need feedback that you must protect
Life in educational IT would significantly simplify if schools didn’t have to collect data and feedback. This data often includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which adds complexity and compliance requirements. FERPA and Section 504 cover complexities such as safeguarding Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and ensuring accessibility. Educators’ varied methods pose challenges in safeguarding and reporting collected data.
Don’t make it a full-time job
How do you gather, protect, and report feedback efficiently without constant attention?
First, find a solution with security, district-wide flexibility, and ease of use without extensive training.
If your state mandates multilingual communications, you need a solution for surveys/forms supporting multiple languages seamlessly. Freeware often requires separate surveys, increasing data and reporting workload.
Put it together
When it comes time to report registrations, attendance, demographics, and test scores, does somebody need to find each report, figure out how to compile them, and then turn them into usable charts, graphs, and numbers?
The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) effectively and securely compiles data from 29 different schools. It stores it centrally so that the schools can access what they need to report to different government agencies and others.
This provides schools benchmarking data to compare enrollments, demographics, salaries, aiding competitiveness. AICAD controls access to the information, so people only have access to the data that they need, based on their roles.
Free isn’t Truly Free
In the blog, Don’t Let Unknown Data Siloes Put Your Entire School District at Risk, we discussed the actual cost of “free” survey and form software. Selecting a secure and flexible solution allows everyone in your school and district community to voice their opinions effectively. This avoids the potential hidden costs associated with free solutions and provides peace of mind.
Alchemer offers that for schools and districts. You can use Alchemer for so much more than just surveys and forms.
One educational service district uses Alchemer to collect art for their annual show. Teachers work with students to enter a photograph of their work, which then goes into a central database for judging. The same database also includes employee satisfaction ratings, program referral data, and even political polling information. Alchemer tightly controls access, ensuring individuals receive only the information they need for their roles.
Using a secure SaaS (Software as a Service) solution such as Alchemer places your survey, poll, and form data in the cloud. Alchemer ensures end-to-end data encryption, data residency, isolation, redundancy, proactive monitoring, and data retention compliance.
Going forward, let Alchemer offload this challenge for you, keeping all of your data safe in the cloud, secured, and available.
Read the other blog posts in this series
- Why School Districts Need a Centralized Survey Platform
- How School IT Departments Can Worry Less and Focus More on Security
Read more about Alchemer’s security and compliance.
Learn more about Alchemer’s work in education.
Schedule an Alchemer demonstration.
