EdLaw nat/us/ferpa/README.md

language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-04

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

US federal law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, 20 U.S.C. §1232g) protecting the privacy of students' education records, implemented by regulations at 34 CFR Part 99. It applies to educational agencies and institutions that receive funds from the US Department of Education (§99.1) — effectively all US public K-12 schools and districts. Administered and enforced by the Department of Education as a funding condition.

Applicability to EdTech

FERPA binds the school, not the vendor — but vendors receive education records under the school-official exception (§99.31(a)(1)): an outside party may be treated as a school official only if it performs an institutional service the school would otherwise use employees for, is under the direct control of the school with respect to use and maintenance of the records, and uses them only as directed. The school must use "reasonable methods" to limit access. Redisclosure is restricted by §99.33. This is the mechanism US districts invoke when contracting EdTech, and the source of the "authorized educational purposes and under the district's direct control" language in district RFIs.

Part 99 contains no express security section; the Department of Education interprets FERPA's prohibition on unauthorised release as requiring reasonable protective methods, and publishes vendor-contract guidance through its Privacy Technical Assistance Center (see studentprivacy.ed.gov).

Contents

Document Covers
SCOPE-AND-DEFINITIONS.md 34 CFR §§99.1–99.3 — applicability and definitions (education records, PII, disclosure)
DISCLOSURES.md 34 CFR §§99.30–99.33, 99.35 — consent, the §99.31 exceptions (school official), recordkeeping, redisclosure, audit/evaluation

Scope note: the statute (20 U.S.C. §1232g) is linked rather than reproduced; the regulations carry the operational detail and are reproduced verbatim from the eCFR.

Licence

The corpus reproduces 34 CFR §§ 99.1–99.3, 99.30–99.33 and 99.35 (Department of Education) verbatim from the eCFR, published by the Office of the Federal Register and the Government Publishing Office. The statute is linked, not reproduced. It is a work of the United States Government. 17 U.S.C. § 105(a) (govinfo, United States Code 2024 edition, title 17 § 105, read 2026-10-01) provides: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."

The Government Publishing Office's Public Domain & Copyright Notice (govinfo.gov/about/policies, read 2026-10-01) adds: "By virtue of the foregoing, public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction. However, Government publications may contain copyrighted material which was used with permission of the copyright owner." It also says that "whenever a work is published consisting predominantly of work of the U.S. Government, the copyright notice (if any) must identify those parts of the work in which copyright is claimed per 17 U.S.C. § 403."

Conditions: none attach to the text itself. The one formal point is § 403: if the public pages ever carry a copyright notice, it must identify the parts in which copyright is claimed (the corpus's own curation) and not cover the reproduced federal text. The corpus names the source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Sources