Politicker ME has a recent article about a student privacy bill being considered in Augusta. I was hoping that it had to do with students' physical privacy, but it turned out that it had to do with collecting data to meet federal requirements. Since this is a large part of what I do (for medical purposes, rather than educational), I decided to look into it a bit more.

Apparently, the Maine DoE collects information about students disciplined in school as part of their reporting requirements for federal grants. The bill would add a section to state education disclosure law which reads as follows:

A school may not disclose the name of a student involved in prohibited behavior unless specifically required to by state or federal law. The department shall assist a school in conforming to the provisions of this subsection. This subsection may be enforced by a civil action brought by a student or parent of a student whose name has been disclosed or a school official or school administrative unit in which the student attends school.

In a public hearing on the 6th, Commissioner Gendron stated that without collecting that information, it would put federal funding at risk, including the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education) Act. Curious about this specific assertion, I decided to look up exactly what was supposed to be reported.

(b) Data collection. (1) Each State must collect valid and reliable information as needed to report annually to the Secretary on the indicators established by the Secretary for the State performance plans.

(2) If the Secretary permits States to collect data on specific indicators through State monitoring or sampling, and the State collects the data through State monitoring or sampling, the State must collect data on those indicators for each LEA at least once during the period of the State performance plan.

(3) Nothing in Part B of the Act shall be construed to authorize the development of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals involved in studies or other collections of data under Part B of the Act.

Later on, it states:

(3) Privacy. The State must not report to the public or the Secretary any information on performance that would result in the disclosure of personally identifiable information about individual children, or where the available data are insufficient to yield statistically reliable information.

The law that establishes the reporting requirements for IDEA is 20 U.S.C. 1418(a)(1)(A), if you want to look up the details.

But this is getting too specific. In any case, I agree that the state has no need to track PII - if each school district has its own system of identifiers, which they can connect to the students if needed to verify their reports, that's good enough: the state has no need of it for these purposes.