Practical Tools to Protect Student Data: The Wisconsin Alliance

by Annette Smith, Director of Instructional Technology Services, DPI

How do Districts band together to encourage the vendors they work with to protect student data? DPI has purchased membership into the Student Data Privacy Consortium for ALL Wisconsin schools. Membership includes three powerful tools to securing your students data:

A template contract that includes data privacy and security language, fully vetted to meet WI laws. If a vendor signs this contract and appendix E for any district in Wisconsin, they must honor that same language for all WI districts. One district shared that this took negotiations from months, to days.
A state and national list of vendors who have agreed to the privacy and security language. This includes free software/applications.
A process for vetting software/applications before purchasing and loading onto the network.

A group of WI Technology Leaders have been implementing the resources and presenting around the state and informational webinars will be posted on the DPI website. In addition, I will be doing a webinar with AWSA this spring on this topic.

Please reach out to me at [email protected] (608) 266-3856 if you would like additional assistance.