Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Department of Education is seeking comment on a new student database.  From Student Privacy Matters: The U.S. Department of Education intends to create a new student database to house the personally identifiable information of 12,000 students, 500 teachers and 104 principals from 104 unidentified schools in 12 school districts across the country.

Here's the district's info on the new link to The Source . The online student gradebook The Source and other student tools will now be one click away. Beginning Sept. 9 , the link to The Source will be replaced with “Student Portal” on the top right side of your school and the district webpages to access The Source and Schoology. See  yellow circle in the image to the left to see where to look for the link.

The Senate HELP (Health Education Labor and Pensions committee) is negotiating over the re-authorization of the Education Sciences Reform Act.  We were told that there are Democrats on the committee who are pushing for relaxing limits on access to personal student data, and are saying that researchers should be able to obtain open-ended access to complete student data sets– and that they shouldn’t have to even specify which specific student level data they want for what purposes. Please call Senator Patty Murray, who is a senior member of the HELP committee, and let her know strong controls and oversight of student data are important to you. It is especially important that parents/advocates who live in the states represented by Dems below call on Monday. Senator Murray's D.C. office:   (toll-free) 866-481-9186