The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) announced the North Carolina Department of Instruction and the South Carolina Department of Education have partnered with CoSN on a program to improve student data privacy practices in their school districts.
The Carolinas are now participating in the CoSN Trusted Learning Environment (TLE) State Partnership Program, which will help ensure that K-12 education institutions across the two states are equipped with the necessary tools, training, and guidance to build and improve their school districts’ student data privacy programs.
“Protecting student data privacy has never been more important or more complex. From securing internal systems to assessing vendor technologies and providing adequate training for employees, the work takes expertise, persistence, and an organizational culture that prioritizes privacy,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking. “The Carolinas are leading the charge to support their school districts in maintaining and improving privacy practices. Through participation in CoSN’s TLE State Partnership Program, they are ensuring that their school districts are equipped with the tools, training, and resources to more effectively safeguard student information.”
The partnership provides free TLE Seal applications to all districts in the two states. Additionally, as part of the TLE Partnership Program, the states will have access to data privacy benchmarking reports that provide aggregate measures of each state’s district privacy programs compared with aggregate measures from TLE Seal recipients across 25 specific privacy practices. These reports are accompanied by CoSN’s student data privacy resources designed to support areas of growth for each state’s districts.
“In South Carolina, we prioritize building and maintaining high standards of privacy and security across all of our school districts. By partnering with CoSN through the Trusted Learning Environment State Partnership Program, we are ensuring that every district in South Carolina has the opportunity to access the tools and guidance necessary to help build robust student data privacy programs,” said Valarie Byrd, a senior consultant in the School District Technology Services with the Division of Data, Technology & Agency Operations at the South Carolina Department of Education. “This subscription reinforces our commitment to keep our students safe as they access digital platforms.”
