Schools have changed greatly over the past decade with the use of technology in and out of the classroom, and massive amounts of data are being collected on our children that parents have no control over at the present time. Students are being tracked, traced, monitored, and scored now more than ever before.

In May 2018, a bill was introduced in the IL Senate that would have had the IL State Board of Education administer a survey of all high school juniors in conjunction with the administration of the state test and share the survey data with all public institutions of higher education in Illinois. After opposition from RYH Action, the bill was amended instead to set up a taskforce to study this type of data sharing (PA 100-1007).

Our co-directors, Cassie and Wendy, are in Springfield this week to work on a number of issues! They will be meeting with Representatives Andrade, Martwick, and Williams to work on a data privacy bill. They will also be meeting with legislators to discuss the possibility of an override vote on the class-size goals bill Governor Rauner vetoed.

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RYHA has been busy this fall hosting Mayoral candidate meet and greets with We Will, registering people to vote, and connecting parents by legislative district so they can advocate together.  

Thanks to all of you who came out to the student-data privacy hearing on Tuesday, August 7, in the IL House Cybersecurity Committee! There were quite a few parents in attendance and several who testified. Raise Your Hand Action pushed for this hearing because we have been trying to get a simple data privacy bill passed and have come up against serious opposition from the ed tech lobby and school management groups. 

There’s a hearing in the IL Senate Education Committee tomorrow afternoon (Tues. March 13th) at 1:30pm covering several bills important for public ed advocates like you to weigh in on!

In an era of big data and the push for ever-increasing amounts of technology used in and out of the classroom in the public school system, student data privacy is an important issue for families. You can read our outline here of a comprehensive set of legislation that's needed in Illinois to provide adequate protections for students' personally-identifiable information (PII).

And Raise Your Hand has a backgrounder about why we need better student data privacy protections.

Raise Your Hand helped to organize parents successfully in 2013 to stop the InBloom student data project in Illinois. In spring 2017, the IL General Assembly passed the Student Online Privacy Protection Act, SB1796, a bill that RYH Action opposed. You can read more about this bill and why we opposed it here. Although SOPPA includes some protections for student data, it contains many loopholes that favor tech industry profits over protecting the privacy and security of children's personal information.

This session we are working on HB1295, the Student Information Transparency Act. You can read a one-pager about this bill here.

Want to know more? The national group Parent Coalition for Student Privacy has some of the best resources for protecting and advocating for your child and all children's data privacy, including a great new toolkit for helping parents investigate and advocate on this issue.

Is this an issue that interests you? Email us to join our working group on ed tech and student data privacy.

The Student Online Privacy Protection Act, SB1796, does the opposite of what it is intended to: instead of protecting student data, it will write into law tech companies' existing misuse of students' personally identifiable information. For every small benefit children get with this bill, website and app operators get a huge gift. Call your state rep and tell them to vote NO.