Practically speaking, schools need a way to keep data on students and families. Designing custom software and locally hosting it is expensive. Also, a school-hosted server is not inherently more secure than an off-site host. It may be *less* so. Using large vendors also makes it easier to transfer data between schools as children advance. In much the same way that you have health data stored online through provider systems and insurance companies, school data will also continue to work this way.

You can, however, push for better regulation of online data security. Unfortunately, our geriatric legislators and judges don’t seem to have a good handle on what better legal management would look like.

Anonymous wrote:You post maxes no sense. How do tech and school not mix. It’s not something they can avoid. It’s not something anyone can avoid. Some of the best companies have had data beaches. It’s extremely difficult to protect fully from these types of things. Do you have a solution?

It can absolutely be avoided. For one, outside vendors should not be allowed to store students' data on their servers. EdTech is big business and your child's birthdate, parents' names and home address, email addresses, skill level relative to their peers, and other sensitive data is being held by private companies - many of which are then sold to other companies both in the United States and overseas including to China.

The dissidents, diplomats and other high level families that put their trust in the public school systems around here are putting themselves at risk.

You can hope and pray that your child's data does not get sold but odds are it will. And if it's not sold, its stolen.

Your data is worth money. Your child's data is worth **a lot** of money.

You post maxes no sense. How do tech and school not mix. It’s not something they can avoid. It’s not something anyone can avoid. Some of the best companies have had data beaches. It’s extremely difficult to protect fully from these types of things. Do you have a solution?

In yet another example of why tech and schools don't mix, PowerSchools was hacked and sensitive data about students was stolen. In an area where the children of so many foreign diplomats and high-level government officials attend FCPS and other school districts, the continuous breach of privileged student data systems should be raising alarms.

https://www.fairfaxtimes.com/articles/fairfax-county-public-schools-superintendent-silent-about-a-massive-data-breach-by-a-tech-vendor/article_0d54a388-d02e-11ef-afe7-4788249b7dce.html