Last chance to reserve your seat for our Skinny dinner & to urge NYSED to strengthen its enforcement of student privacy protections!

1. Our annual Skinny award dinner is only a few days away, on Tuesday June 19. Please buy your ticket today to ensure your seat at one of the most fun events of the year, to support Class Size Matters going forward, and to honor our awardees, Council Member Danny Dromm, Norm Scott and Fred Smith.

2. Only two more NY State Education Department student privacy forums remain: tonight, Friday June 15, in Albany and on Monday June 18th in Queens at Aviation HS in Long Island City; more info here. I urge anyone who can attend to do so. In any case, please send in your comments ASAP to PrivacyForumComment@nysed.gov; the deadline is the end of the day on Monday, June 18th.

On my blog, I provide a sample message you can use, focusing on how the state needs to strengthen its Parent Bill of Privacy Rights and step up in enforcing the current state law, Section 2-D, passed in 2014; I also provide several disturbing examples of how NYC DOE is currently allowing access to sensitive personal student information to contractors and vendors without parental notification or consent, and in the process, refusing to adhere to state and federal privacy protections. On the blog is also a copy of my testimony from Monday’s privacy forum, with more discussion of these issues, and an explanation of how the state’s student data is still extremely vulnerable to breach and abuse.

3. In a related issue, if any of you have a child who recently took the PSAT or the SAT at school, please contact me. In many cases, students are asked a list of personal questions by the College Board before these exams without being told they are purely voluntary and without the school or district requiring prior parental written consent. Doing so violates several federal privacy laws, according to recent guidance from the US Department of Education, and we are considering whether to file complaints about this practice with the state and federal government. To make things worse, the College Board currently sells this information at .43 cents per student.
In any event, please remember to send in your comments to the state about student privacy before Monday night– and please reserve your seat at the Skinnies today!