Bill H.127 Protecting Student Data to be Refiled

September 2022

A bill to protect student and educator data will be filed again this legislative session, according to State Representative Kate Lipper-Garabedian, and the new bill will add data kept by schools to its list of student and educator information the new law would protect.

The bill, formally referred to as H.127, would protect the information families provide to schools, as well as the information educators share with their employers. It also means that data used in any school-affiliated program would be protected and unable to be monitored or sold to other companies. It is sponsored by Representative Lipper-Garabedian and Representative Jeffery Roy. The former has a storied background in education and litigation at EducationCounsel LLC, where she even wrote a report in 2014 about this very subject. 

An earlier version of the bill, H.585, only protected student data. Lipper-Garabedian was adamant that educators are included in the bill, so she used her background in education policy to get the ball rolling at the State House. 

“When I went in for the state and was working as Chief Legal Counsel to the Secretary of Education, I raised this issue that Massachusetts still hadn’t produced any updates on its own state laws,” she said. “So I’m really thrilled to be in a position now to introduce the bill that I was hoping someone would.”

The original sponsor of H.585, Representative Kimberly Furgerson, declined to comment on this article, although Lipper-Garabedian indicated that H.127 has Furgerson’s support. 

The report Lipper-Garabedian wrote for EducationCounsel operates as a checklist of sorts for states on how to adopt their policies to a new digital age, including how to define “educational data” and what kinds of data security plans to adopt. Under her watch, H.127 checks all of those boxes. 

“I actually went back to my own checklist almost a decade later to make sure that we were covering everything that we might want to,” she said. 

The bill protects “covered information,” which is data linked to a particular student, educator, or administrator, from “operators,” who are people or entities operating with a school to provide an internet program. Covered information includes data like home addresses, emails, discipline records, medical records test results, grades, political affiliations, and food purchases. 

The catch: technology tends to move a whole lot faster than the government can legislate. To rectify this, Lipper-Garabedian and Roy both were in contact with “experts'' like the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

“You’re never guaranteed to get a bill through the process to update a previous law,” she said. “It is important to recognize that balance between what the law or statute requires and then how much power you’re providing to the state agencies that implement the law.”

Both the MTA and the Board did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

One incident with her own child shaped Lipper-Garabedian’s opinion on the subject. 

“There was an application that my then first grader son was working on at home during his remote learning time,” she said. “It was an app for math. He really enjoyed it and the teacher recommended it.” She was in a briefing on student data privacy for EducationCounsel when a colleague informed her that the app her son used was under federal investigation for targeting advertisements to students.

“That was a reinforcement [for me] that teachers and educators really need to be thinking more about this,” she said.

The bill is currently in the House Ways and Means Committee, and it is unlikely to be passed this session. However, Lipper-Garabedian is confident the bill will see the light of day during the next session. It also helps, she says, that there has been no opposition.

“Even the conversations we’re having now will hopefully provide a stronger foundation for it in the new session, where we can talk to colleagues and keep pushing this,” she said.