The letter is embedded below the press release.
For immediate release: May 27, 2025
For more information:
Leonie Haimson, info@studentprivacymatters.org; 917-435-9329
Rosa Diaz, Rdiaz.cec4@gmail.com; 347-885-1687
Shannon Edwards, shannon@aiforfamilies.com; 347-719-2161
Kaye Dyja, kdyja@nyclu.org; 212-203-3532
On Wednesday May 28, 2025, the Panel for Educational Policy is scheduled to vote on the revisions to Chancellor’s regulation A-820, which would significantly weaken student privacy protections. It would allow the Department of Education to share a wide range of sensitive student data with third parties as long as they believe it would benefit the student or the school system. Members of the Chancellor’s Data Privacy Working Group, NYC Council Members, and Community Education Council leaders, as well as several advocacy organizations including the NY Civil Liberties Union, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, Dignity in Schools Coalition, and the Alliance for Quality Education, have signed onto a letter to Chancellor Ramos, urging her to delay this vote because of the risk to student safety and privacy if these regulations are approved.
The data that could be shared by Department of Education officials with any third party they please, as long as they considered it beneficial to the student or the system as a whole, would include a student’s name, email address, home address, phone number, and photo, as well as their parents’ contact information and a wide range of additional personal information.
Because of the concerns expressed by parents and advocates last October, including over 3,000 emails sent to the Chancellor and members of the PEP, the initial vote on these revisions was postponed and a Data Privacy Working Group (DPWG) was appointed by the Chancellor. While some significant improvements have been made as a result of the Group’s discussions, the proposed regulations remain too risky, allowing the disclosure of highly sensitive student data with only an unreliable parent opt out method to prevent this.
Rosa Diaz, the chair of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council and a member of the DPWG said, “Parents deserve the right to control the dispersal of their children’s sensitive personal information, especially when it’s being transmitted to companies or individuals not performing any services to our schools. We are especially concerned about how this information might be used to threaten the safety of our most vulnerable immigrant children, at a time when their privacy is being assaulted and data misused by the Trump administration.”
Nequan McLean, another member of the Chancellor’s DPWG, and President of Community Education Council 16 and the Education Council Consortium said, “If approved, this regulation would open up all sorts of unacceptable harms to public school families, including potentially allowing charter schools to aggressively recruit students directly and cherry picking the most academically successful ones by making their academic honors publicly available. Already, parents are bombarded with charter school mailings and phone calls, even after they have opted out of such mailings. This harassment could worsen if the proposed amendment to the Chancellor’s regulation A-820 is adopted.”
Shannon Edwards, founder of AI for Families and a member of both the Chancellor’s DPWG and the NY State Education Data Privacy Committee, pointed out, “Too many children are already preyed upon by social media companies and are vulnerable to deep-fake porn and harassment, undermining their mental health. Sharing their personal email and photographs without strict controls could merely exacerbate this dangerous trend. We need far more rigorous oversight and regulation preventing the release of this information, rather than loosening the restrictions, as these revisions to the regulation would allow.”
“Parents may not realize that the DOE is handing over their child’s sensitive information to an unknown number of agencies and private companies. This could include a student’s address, photos, and more; in fact, there are only a few exceptions to what can be shared. We believe that caregivers should have the right to give or withhold consent for their child’s information to be shared. It’s reasonable for schools to have the ability to share some basic information for the purposes of events and communication, but for the DOE as a whole to be able to share almost any information without consent is overreach that disenfranchises students and families. We have seen that our new Chancellor is genuinely responsive to the concerns of families, so we are hopeful that she will consider pausing the vote and revisiting the regulations to allow for more parent agency,” said Kaiser, organizer with the Alliance for Quality Education.
“Given the excessive number of data breaches, the potential of identity theft, and troubling examples of student data already used for targeted advertising and commercial exploitation, as well as the enhanced risk of deportation for our most vulnerable immigrant students, the DOE’s student privacy regulations need strengthening rather than weakening at this time,” said Leonie Haimson, a member of the DPWG and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “We urge the Chancellor not to push through these regulations without more careful consideration of their potential damage to student safety, and to require parent consent rather than opt out for these disclosures.”
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