Tag Archives: FERPA

FERPA and HIPAA Updates: What K‑12 Districts Need to Know

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FERPA, HIPAA, and IDEA haven’t changed in 2026, but the expectations governing them have.

What’s Actually Changed for Districts?

Rising expectations for compliance, protection of student data, and vendor oversight are putting new pressure on superintendents, SPED directors, and K-12 leaders during a time when federal funding is often inadequate and uncertain.

  • The federal government has increased their expectations of K-12 schools in regard to parental rights and has released an updated FAQ addressing obligations.
  • Clarification regarding joint FERPA–HIPAA guidance means that certain student health and mental health records that might be classified as FERPA education records are expected to be treated with HIPAA‑level safeguards when outside providers or school‑based clinics are involved.
  • Vendor and edtech oversight are a growing stress, with districts expected to know exactly which partners handle student data and under what contractual and technical guidelines. The FTC has issued new regulations for edtech providers that directly impact schools.

What This Means for SPED and General Ed

K-12 districts already live at the intersection of FERPA, HIPAA, and IDEA. The new year hasn’t changed that, but now districts are seeing:

  • Less emphasis on repeated medical re‑diagnoses in some eligibility categories, which helps families but still requires careful documentation of the decision to continue services.
  • More precise or more frequent eligibility redeterminations, increasing the volume of evaluations, meetings, and notices that must be tracked.
  • ​A continued expectation that every eligibility and service decision is backed by accessible records, parent participation evidence, and clean timelines.

Each of these areas involves highly sensitive information: evaluations, health details, IEPs, and service logs. FERPA, IDEA, and state complaints so often converge around SPED records.

General education data security is expected to be as strong.

  • MTSS and RTI, behavior and attendance systems, and threat‑assessments often embed counseling, health, or social‑emotional data alongside academic indicators.
  • Collaboration with school resource officers and safety teams raises questions about when “legitimate educational interest” applies, and how disclosures are recorded.
  • State reporting and accountability data reports combine general education and SPED records, widening the circle of staff and systems with access to sensitive information.

Even if you’ve historically thought of FERPA issues as “the registrar’s lane” and HIPAA issues as “the nurse’s lane,” your interconnected systems make privacy a districtwide operational concern.

Four Ways to Be Audit Ready in 2026

Given the heightened oversights and expectations, it is not enough to be compliant; you must adequately demonstrate how you maintain compliance. Here are four concrete moves that help:

Maintain a living data map. Document every system coming into contact with student data: SIS, SPED, assessments, MTSS and RTI, health, transportation, messaging, and vendors. Record data types, owners, user roles, and integrations.

Tighten access and logging. Ensure that role-based permissions match job roles and that activity logs are active and reviewable. You should be able to answer who accessed a record without opening an IT ticket.

Standardize SPED timelines and documentation. Use workflows and reminders to prevent missed evaluations and re-evaluations. Keep IEPs, eligibility records, parent notices, and meeting notes attached to the same student record, not buried in email messages.

Make vendor review a part of privacy, not procurement. Require privacy and security reviews before approving tools. Contracts should define data ownership, permitted uses (including AI training), retentions, deletions, subcontractors, and breach response. Re-review high-risk vendors annually. SchoolDay offers a great guide for building an application approval process.

Where Lumen Touch Fits

Policy alone doesn’t protect you; your platform either enables or undermines your intentions. Your platform either supports compliance or hinders it. Lumen Touch’s all‑in‑one school system connects data streams at the center of FERPA, HIPAA, and IDEA risk, providing:

One environment for academics, SPED, and services. Reduce the emailing, exporting, and duplicating of sensitive data across tools.

SPED workflows aligned to real timelines. Bright SPED supports evaluations, re-evaluations, IEPs, and documentation with built-in reminders and progress tracking.

Role-based access and audit trails. Permissions align to job roles, with logs that show who did what and when.

Reporting without spreadsheets. Answer compliance questions without pulling data into uncontrolled workarounds.

Lumen Touch helps navigate the complexities of compliance and enhance your privacy posture, supporting strong FERPA, HIPAA, and IDEA practices in daily operations. Learn more.

Growing Security Threats – EdTech Has a BRIGHT Future

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Does the heart of a parent or teacher skip a beat when they hear that another school has been hacked? Their immediate thoughts are probably “I hope this doesn’t happen to my school.” But if it does, what can they do? Do board members and superintendents not lay awake at night wondering if their districts are protected from hacking and ransomware, and what the cost would be if their districts or schools became victims of extortion? Do school administrators concern themselves with their liabilities associated with student privacy, FERPA, HIPPA and much, much more?

The pressure that comes with protecting student management and information systems, maintaining compliance with state and federal laws, and delivering sophisticated integrated technologies to teachers and classrooms – all without breaking the budget – is enormous. It’s a difficult challenge, made more difficult by constant physical and digital security threats, unfunded mandates by state and local governments, and in many cases a shortage of IT support.

Schools Are Being Targeted by Hackers

Most schools are already using a variety of EdTech solutions that enhance educational programs, provide communications to their stakeholders; manage food services and bus routes; support students with special needs; provide data analytics; maintain data for audits; or help to manage buildings, libraries, student clinics, and school cafeterias. But when more than 500 schools have experienced targeted ransomware attacks in 2019 alone, the underlying security of any EdTech solution introduced to a school district must be a top consideration.

The social responsibility for managing technology in the education space is already overwhelming and will become more so with the advent of artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality, and the increased onslaught of cyber-attacks. This all equates to escalating costs to keep the demons out! The threat has become so significant that last year, the FBI issued a warning about the growing threat to schools.

The Daunting Task Before School Administrators

There is no turning back from this digital frontier; so how do you continue to deliver top-quality education and effectively provide student and data security, streamline workflow for overworked teachers and administrators, while also fostering community support with strong security and fiscal responsibility?

So, What Keeps the CEO of Lumen Touch and His Team Awake at Night?

“The last thing I ever want to hear is that one of our school partners have had a tragedy of some kind with one of their students, families, or staff members,” said Dr John Vandewalle, CEO. “The next thing that I loathe to hear is that their technology or data has been compromised in some way!”

How Do We Manage Effective School and Data Security?

We maintain updates and configurations for all of our services, keeping with industry best practices. Isolation of risk and standardization are core principals we use when determining the design and configurations of our services, and rather than react to existing threats, we work under the assumption that all networks are potentially hostile, including other servers in the local network and clients across the web. With this assumption in mind, we have explicitly banned the use of defaulted trust between services. All systems have access rules and firewalls enforced.

We have migrated to a fluid system of interoperability that allows for sharing of data across platforms and vendors while creating technological engines for automated data integration. This allows us to meet the standards of Ed-Fi, IMS Global, CoSN, and other organizations that create these standards. We are also able to distribute data across platforms in a just-in-time manner that provides instant communication and dashboards to all stakeholders, from board members to students and their families, on the technology of their choice.

Support Overworked Teachers and Administrators

Lumen Touch is dedicated to helping schools and districts transform how they deliver education, support teachers, and manage their schools, using EdTech that is not only comprehensive but extremely secure. Our all-in-one solution delivers remedies for everything a school district requires. Watch for our next blog, when we will discuss streamlining workflow and guarding against workplace dissatisfaction and teacher turnover.

Fiscal Responsibility – Save Your District Time and Money

Schools that implement Lumen Touch experience an average savings of 30% to 60%, which is realized from the time of engagement. In addition, Lumen Touch eases the aggravation that may result from negotiating with multiple vendors and removes the need for telecom contracts, carriers, and fees.

If meeting EdTech mandates has overwhelmed your school and district, let Lumen Touch demonstrate how we can free you up to focus on what’s really important: educating students and creating the leaders of the future.  Email us at sales@lumentouch.com, call us at 816.880.0066, or visit www.lumentouch.com.