The Utah State Board of Education has spent several months debating whether school districts should be required to share family contact information with charter schools. Even after its latest full board meeting on March 7, the board was unable to come to a consensus. Instead, they sent the issue back to committee with a suggestion.
Charters want this information so they can directly advertise to families with students in public schools.
Charters, which are public schools in Utah, are already able to request this information. However, school districts get to decide whether or not they share it. Over recent years, more districts have been denying those requests. Mainly early-college high school charters asked the board for help addressing this.
The board has discussed several possible changes to its “Public School Confidentiality and Disclosure Rule” rule to provide this information to charter schools, like having it flow through the state board. The proposal the board focused on at the meeting was amending the rule to require school districts to hand over the information, but still allowing parents to opt out.
Parents and some education groups have raised concerns about data security.
“As a parent of children in a district, I did not give my contact information to my [school district] so that they could send it out to a hundred or more charter schools across the state to be used for marketing purposes,” said Amber Bonner, education commissioner for the Utah PTA.
But for some school board members, this is less of a question about data privacy and more about advertising.
“I think that we have to remember that directory information flows out of [school districts] readily all the time,” board member Christina Boggess said during the meeting.
As noted by Vice Chair Jennie Earl, districts and charter schools already share student names, telephone numbers and addresses with military and college recruiters. However, families can opt-out.
Board members who support requiring school districts to share contact information argued not only is it already being shared in other places, but the purpose of doing so would be to let families know about all of their options in public education.
“We are trying to hold our charter schools to a different standard than we hold everyone else,” Boggess argued.
Board member Sarah Reale said she supports charter schools but spoke against this idea because she thought it’s “unfair to give away free data for marketing and communications purposes.” This is a “space where data is never free.”
Other board members shared concerns about security, parents’ rights, the cost and not letting individual districts decide what they share. Board member Cindy Davis said she hasn’t heard from any parents who are in favor of this forced data sharing and she’s even heard from some charter schools who oppose it.
While some, like chair James Moss, were in favor of requiring districts to hand over student information to charters, in the end, board members narrowly voted 8-7 to send this issue back to committee.
With that vote, the board also asked the committee to consider making information more accessible to parents about their public school options, like having something on the board’s website that outlines those options and requiring school districts to have a link to it on their websites.
When the rule goes back to committee, a board spokesperson said they could choose to get rid of the part about requiring districts to share data or they could keep it. The committee does not have to include the board’s suggestion about putting public school options on the board’s website.
If the committee can come to a consensus on how they want to handle the issue, it will have to go back to the full board for another vote.
