For Immediate Release, Monday Aug 26, 2019

On Friday Governor Pritzker signed PA 101-0516 (HB3606), an update to Illinois’ Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA) into law. The legislation, one of the most far-reaching student data protection laws in the country, will provide much greater transparency and control to parents on how schools, vendors and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) are collecting and using data from public school students from preschool through 12th grade.

Please put in calls to your state senator about two Raise Your Hand Actions initiatives, HB3606, the student data privacy bill, and the HB254, the class size goals and transparency bill. Both bills are scheduled for a hearing tomorrow---Tuesday, May 14th.

Schools have changed greatly over the past decade with the use of technology in and out of the classroom, and massive amounts of data are being collected on our children that parents have no control over at the present time. Students are being tracked, traced, monitored, and scored now more than ever before.

Thanks to all of you who came out to the student-data privacy hearing on Tuesday, August 7, in the IL House Cybersecurity Committee! There were quite a few parents in attendance and several who testified. Raise Your Hand Action pushed for this hearing because we have been trying to get a simple data privacy bill passed and have come up against serious opposition from the ed tech lobby and school management groups. 

HB1295, the Student Information Transparency Act, a bill that RYH Action helped draft. We'll be meeting with the opponents of this bill again next week for further negotiations. You can help us by writing a quick note to your legislators about why action on student privacy is more urgent than ever.

The Student Online Privacy Protection Act, SB1796, does the opposite of what it is intended to: instead of protecting student data, it will write into law tech companies' existing misuse of students' personally identifiable information. For every small benefit children get with this bill, website and app operators get a huge gift. Call your state rep and tell them to vote NO.

Ever more digital data is collected about and from students in public school, and the security and privacy of this data is a major concern for parents. We would love to see robust legislation passed in Illinois that builds on the protections of our existing student privacy law in this new era of big data and ed tech. But SB1796, the Student Online Privacy Protection Act, is not that legislation.