In addition to offering broad insight, the data-sharing agreement will enable educators to connect with individual students for more personalized support. The project seeks to improve dual-enrollment programs, which allow high school students to earn college credits. It also aims to help adult learners return to college if they left with unfinished degrees.
These details were laid out in a webinar in October by the Sacramento K-16 Collaborative, an eight-county alliance of school districts, colleges, county offices of education, community organizations and employers. Members of the collaborative started planning for the data-sharing initiative in March, with funding from the state’s Regional K-16 Education Collaboratives Grant Program.
The pilot partnership includes the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE), Elk Grove Unified School District, the Los Rios Community College District, Sacramento State and UC Davis. All five parties signed a memorandum of understanding, which establishes the scope of the agreement, in early September. Each entity is in the process of finalizing its own secondary data-sharing agreement to pin down details such as who will have access to the data, according to Amber Jacobo, director of continuous improvement and planning at SCOE and one of three chairs of the data-sharing initiative.
“The minute the secondary data-sharing agreements are signed and agreed upon, we can literally start sharing data pretty much the next day,” she said in the webinar.
The hope is to have the pilot’s data dashboards up and running by spring, Jacobo said, so other local educational institutions can get a better understanding of how the data sharing works and what it can do as they consider joining the agreement. She said her own office will use the shared data to track and refine local dual-enrollment programs.
“Our office has a vested interest in making sure many, many students have access to quality dual-enrollment experiences,” Jacobo said. “We want to make sure that we are providing that access to a variety of different students.”
The webinar outlined several other examples of how the data-sharing agreement could benefit students, such as boosting the likelihood of college enrollment by allowing colleges to proactively contact students who look like they will qualify for admission, and letting dual-enrollment participants know how the credits they’ve earned would count toward certain degrees.
The program would also enable college representatives to reach out to adult learners — defined in the webinar as students 25 and older who did not complete their degree — to see what impeded their postsecondary progress, and how any completed coursework might add up to a degree at any of the partner institutions.
To make such tailored outreach possible, the data shared through the agreement includes personally identifiable information (PII), such as student names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers and more. Given the sensitive nature of sharing PII, a law firm was brought in to coordinate the agreement.
Thuy Nguyen, a partner at the firm and one of two attorneys central to composing the agreement, said the initiative relies on a series of exceptions to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Based on these exceptions, she said, institutions that sign the agreement can legally share specific student data for a wealth of actionable insight.
“By sharing PII, we’re able to then contact the students, get in touch with the students, and do intervention types of programs and services,” Nguyen said in the webinar. “So this is where the excitement occurs.”
It’s also where the concern occurs, according to Manveer Bola, associate vice chancellor of information technology at Los Rios Community College District and a second chair of the data-sharing initiative. Bola said protecting student PII is crucial to the success of the agreement.
He went over the nuts and bolts of the program’s security measures during the webinar. These included a data security and governance committee, a custom compliance training program, cybersecurity insurance, and a detailed cybersecurity framework, the latter of which includes guidance on the data-sharing system’s three layers of defense: encryption, identity and access management, and network access control.
“It lays out pretty stringent requirements for each of those layers,” he said.
Bola also explained the basic architecture of the data-sharing system, stating that the mission was to create a model that is both sustainable and secure, and that gives each entity complete control over the data they share by storing it "within their own technical environment.”
