PPS School Climate Survey - Now With an Updated Privacy Policy
2 min read
On January 20th, 2015, Portland Public Schools launched a school climate survey as part of a first effort to get more feedback, more regularly from parents within the District.
This launch was a little rocky. We noted some problems with the privacy policy on the survey. The Oregonian announced the launch of the survey, but the way the Oregonian story described student participation would have had PPS running afoul of PPRA, and possibly COPPA (and to state the obvious, it would be good for the Oregonian to update their story to reflect reality).
Since the launch, however, there have been real and substantial improvements. PPS staff facilitated an introduction to the team at Oregon Kitchen's Table, the group helping PPS with administering the survey, and they were completely open to rewriting their privacy terms to make their intent clear, and to strengthen their privacy terms. Over the last few days, we all worked at editing the terms, and then met face to face to hash out the final version. Then, the terms were vetted by a lawyer who recommended some additional clarifications, and now, the updated terms are now live on their site.
Their new privacy policy is good - and that's not something I say often about privacy policies.
The folks at Oregon's Kitchen Table deserve a huge amount of credit for their responsiveness and work. They prioritized these improvements, and got them done incredibly quickly, without compromising anything in their mission, and without taking shortcuts. This is what success looks like.
