Piper Hansen is the Editor-in-Chief of Manual RedEye, the student newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky’s duPont Manual High School. She researched and wrote a really excellent piece on student digital privacy. It begins:
Amid the college application deadlines, school-work and football games in mid-October, duPont Manual’s senior class met in the auditorium, quickly filling the seats at the front of the room as Principal Darryl Farmer and several assistant principals faced them.
The administrators quieted the group of students and began to show them how to log in to a special website where they would upload evidence of their learning as part of Jefferson County Public Schools’ (JCPS) newest graduation requirement, the Backpack of Success Skills.
But what students and some administrators didn’t know was that the district may have been violating federal law by requiring them to use online resources, like the Backpack, without obtaining parental consent for the district-issued account used to access it per the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Read more on Manual RedEye.