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K-12 schools during the pandemic: New National Academies of Science publication discusses unprecedented challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to the nation’s K-12 education system. These challenges certainly include the impacts of school closures, and the range of multi-layered, complex questions of whether to reopen school buildings and how to operate them safely if they do reopen. The pandemic has also highlighted significant fault lines in the student privacy space, which WPF researched and discussed extensively in its extensive student privacy report, Without Consent: An analysis of student directory information practices in US schools, and impacts on privacy, published in April 2020 (See: https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2020/04/without-consent/ ) .

Now, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study report delves into the topic of K-12 schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The consensus report, Reopening K-12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prioritizing health, equity, and communities, is available free (See: https://www.nap.edu/read/25858/chapter/1#viii) and is recommended reading for those interested in looking at systemic issues within the K-12 system. The report does not discuss impacts on health privacy of students, but it does grapple with potential frameworks for decision making, and has an excellent discussion of equity.

Read alongside WPF’s Without Consent report, the NAS study presents a fulsome picture of where the most pressing policy work in K-12 is right now, and hints at where the most important intersections are between impacts of the pandemic and student privacy under the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations.

Related reading:

Without Consent: An analysis of student directory information practices in US schools, and impacts on privacy (WPF Research Report, April 2020 PDF, ebook, web )

Reopening K-12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prioritizing health, equity, and communities (National Academies Press Consensus Report, October 2020, ebook, PDF, web.)

Posted October 12, 2020 in COVID-19, Education privacy
Tags: #K-12

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