Washington, DC, 11 November, 2020 — The Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC), a special interest group of the non-profit Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, is proud to announce the first multiple state usage of the National Data Privacy Agreement (NDPA) to streamline application contracting and set common expectations between schools/districts and marketplace providers.
Today, the SDPC state Alliances of California, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Missouri and Utah are recommending usage of the NDPA in all their contracts with marketplace providers. The remaining 23 Alliances have processes underway to see how they may leverage this work and use the draft soon. While the NDPA allows for any state specific legislative requirements, the majority of the privacy expectations are standardized and can be used by any entity.
“After more than two years of collaborative work between schools, states and marketplace providers to release the first NDPA, the next milestone the Community hit today is the usage of the same set of privacy clauses across numerous states” states Dr. Larry L Fruth II, the A4L/SDPC Executive Director and CEO. “It is a great representation of the goal of the Community to set common expectations between end users and marketplace providers regarding student data privacy”.
The NDPA has been developed with extensive review and comments from schools, districts, state organizations, marketplace providers and their legal representatives. It is designed to address common student data privacy concerns and streamline the educational application contracting processes for schools/districts who do not have the legal or fiscal resources and vendors who previously had to sign “one off” contracts with each of the over 13,000 US school districts.
To access the work of the SDPC, including this marketplace impacting project, visit https://privacy.A4L.org
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About the SDPC and the Access 4 Learning Community
The Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC), a Special Interest Group of the A4L Community, is designed to address the day-to-day, real-world multi-faceted issues that schools, states, territories and vendors face when protecting learner information. SDPC’s vision is to develop common activities, artifacts, templates, tools and effective practices that can be leveraged through a unique collaborative of end users and marketplace providers working together. The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, previously the SIF Association, is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of schools, districts, local authorities, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively address all aspects of learning information management and access to support learning. The A4L Community is “Powered by SIF” Specifications as its major technical tool to allow for this management and access simply, securely and in a scalable, standard way regardless of the platform hosting those applications. To learn more: https://www.A4L.org / https://privacy.A4L.org