The Opelika City School System adheres to all aspects of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as it implements programs and procedures for collecting, managing, storing, transmitting, using, securing, reporting, and destroying data and student information. Appropriate use of data is essential to accelerating student achievement, planning, and school system program effectiveness.
School system data collection, management, and reporting is implemented according to Alabama State Department of Education guidelines and in a manner designed to preserve and protect individual and collective privacy rights and to ensure confidentiality and security of collected data. Local school and system student data is transmitted daily to the Alabama State Department of Education data management system from which state and federal reporting is completed. Each student is assigned a unique student identifier upon enrollment into the student management system to ensure compliance with the privacy rights of each student and his or her parents/guardians. No personally identifiable individual student data is shared in either state or federally required reporting.
Data collected by the school system is maintained within a secure infrastructure. Access to data is limited to pre-identified staff whose job responsibilities include required data collection, analysis, reporting, and management. Training in data security and student privacy laws is provided to these individuals on a regular basis to ensure compliance with school system policies and state and federal privacy laws.
Adopted September 15, 2015