SOPPA and You! How to Navigate a Regulated Digital Space?

@LisaBerghoff\@MrKimDHS

You may have already heard of a few different acronyms like COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) or FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) as relatively new legal initiatives designed to protect the digital privacy rights of our students. SOPPA (Student Online Personal

Protection Act) is the newest iteration of digital privacy law that seeks to limit access of student data by EdTech companies. 

So essentially we have EdTech vendors like EdPuzzle, PowerSchool (Schoology), and a host of others that we entrust with our student data (emails). SOPPA saught to create higher security expectations of these vendors in the face of data breaches and the selling of data. So in order for educators to be allowed to use an EdTech vendor that students use their emails to log into, we must have an agreement in place with the vendor BEFORE students can actively use their services. 

What does that mean for you? In order for your students to use a vendor, you will need to create a request to our district 113 technology department to get an agreement solidified. You can do that here: THSD 113 Product Requests Portal. Search for your specific vendor, and hit request (it could take up to 6 months to get the approval process completed!):

You can peruse our District 113 library to see which vendors are already approved for use:

Know though that we are completely at the mercy of the vendor themselves. If they do not approve of the higher security standards or merely take forever to respond to our inquiry, that will slow down the approval process dramatically. Most of the largest EdTech service providers are adapting to this new legal landscape as Illinois is not the first state to enact such stringent security measures. So while this may tighten the window on available EdTech services we would like to use and experiment with, there is a pathway and it begins here.