Jefferson County Public Schools is working with inBloom, to streamline its student data, raising privacy concerns about how safe student information is.
Some parents have serious concerns, that student grades, test scores, even health records will be vulnerable to cyber attack.
“I’m very concerned about our children’s privacy,” Stickland said. “In my eyes, it’s an invasion of our children’s privacy and parents aren’t involved in the conversation and they’re not allowed to consent.”
The school district says that the current system is a waste of time.
“With inBloom, what that does is it allows teachers to get access to data in a much more efficient way than they do now,” Mortimer said. “They have to log into so many different systems. Eight, 9, 10 systems or more sometimes on a daily basis just to get access to the data that they need.”
Also of concern is the fact that students, and their parents, have no option to opt out of sharing student information with third parties.
Another concern is that inBloom will share student data with third party companies, which may not have the same digital security technology.
Jeffco points out the pilot program is in full compliance with FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, although those laws were recently relaxed to allow collection and sharing of student data without parental consent.
