For K-12 privacy, districts need commonality, CIO says

School districts are struggling to find the balance between privacy and emerging technology, but they can look to examples like the Europe Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, says Boulder Valley School District’s chief information officer.

“Here in America, we are struggling to find out what [the privacy balance] means,” district CIO Andrew Moore says in a video interview.

Moore’s district, which serves about 28,000 students in Boulder, Colorado, needs to contend with some regulation around data privacy. The State of Colorado has its own student data privacy law, which requires districts to work with vendors on a data privacy addendum that ensures safety and security for any student-facing applications or tools.

“When I think about all the work that we’re putting in, and then I think about the European solution where this one model we can all get behind that we can all understand, there is a lot of energy, wasted resources, in my opinion, that’s happening in our space,” Moore says.

Those wasted resources are particularly challenging for K-12 CIOs, who traditionally do not have large IT teams, he says.

“That is a drain on our resources,” Moore says. “As we continue to move forward, I’m hopeful that we will start to get some commonality between our contracts [and that] there will be better regulations so that we all know what the rules are of the game that we’re playing.”

Moore on cybersecurity and privacy:

Moore on emerging tech:

Moore on the changing priorities of CIOs:

This video was filmed at the Consortium for School Networking’s annual conference in Portland, Oregon, on April 1, 2019.