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Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

I work with several schools as part of my volunteer work. And while it's a neat idea, but it is an EdTech startup that doesn't understand the legalities of school data. In the 49 states that Clever isn't sitting with servers in using them would be illegal.

In most states you couldn't store data on third parties servers with out consent from the kids parents.

Using Cloud Offerings just isn't permissible in most places because of the legalities. Clever would need a lot more than $10M to change all the necessary Federal, State, County, City, laws.

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Can you point to the actual law that outlaws this?

I work in edtech, and there is a lot of FUD around this issue. I'm not in the US, so I'm not familiar with the specifics of the laws there though.

FERPA is the big one.http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html

IANAL, but to me that reads like it specifically gives permission of what Clever is doing.

FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR § 99.31): ... - Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school; - Accrediting organizations;

And additionally:

Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance.

I believe this is the why our Armed Forces recruiters often have the names, addresses and phone numbers of our graduating seniors every year. It's usually up to the school administrators to release this information upon request, and most do. Private schools do not have this issue.

So it's a cloud solution?

It is an off premise, out of state, third party, Internet based solution.

Having worked with a lot of schools you can't even do this for Backups of data legally. eMail through Google, or Microsoft technically can get you in trouble if you use it for the Faculty.

Basically Privacy of Minors trumps convenience for IT

I know some/many schools use hosted solutions for their SIS. How is this different?

That's not true.

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