Important Student Data Privacy Bills

Four important bills dealing with student data privacy will be considered by the Louisiana House Education Committee this Wednesday, March 19. If your State Representative is a member of the House Education Committee, you may want to send him/her an email expressing your opinion on student privacy. If you want to check to see who your state Representative is, just click on this link to the legislative web site, type in your address and it will list your State Representative, State Senator, and Congresspersons. You should then simply click on your State Representative's  name to go to his/her web page and get his/her email address. Save it on your email contact list and you will be ready to send him/her emails when there are important education bills to be voted on.

In fact, I am asking you to send your state representative an email this Monday or Tuesday particularly if he/she serves on the House Education Committee. Please do your part if you care about student data privacy!

This Wednesday, March 19^th the House Education Committee will be voting on 4 bills that deal with privacy of student data. They are HB 384, HB 555, HB 560, and HB 946. You can view each bill by clicking on the bill number. 

 

Many Louisiana parents have made it clear that they are very concerned about the possibility that data pertaining to their child may be shared by our Dept. of Education or others with third parties who may try to profit by selling goods or services or even sell voucher plans to the parents. My readers may remember that John White originally planned to share student data using the InBloom system. He has since recalled the Louisiana data from the system.

 

Like the parents, I support all of the above bills which would greatly limit what can be done with information collected by the DOE on Louisiana students. I believe that if any recommendations are to be made to parents about the educational needs of their child, it should be done by trusted local teachers or guidance counselors, not self appointed salesmen for big business or rip off voucher programs.

Here is a sample email by teachers or parents:
 

Dear Representative _________,

I am a teacher (parent) who lives in your district. I am very much in support of any legislation that would protect the privacy of educational information and data collected on our students. Please vote for HB 384, HB 555, HB 560, and HB 946 or any proper consolidation of these bills.

Thank you in advance for your help with this important issue.

Sincerely,
 

Please feel free to put this in your own words since legislators respond better to individual rather than form emails.

At this point we have no reason to believe that there is strong opposition to the above bills but it is very important that we make our wishes know on this important matter.