EdLaw
Mississippi — student data (research note: no dedicated statute)
Mississippi has no student-data-privacy statute. The TODO row that created this folder cited "Miss. Code §37-161-1 et seq." as a working identification; that citation is wrong, and chasing it is what turned the row up. Title 37, Chapter 161 is the Mississippi Education Reform Act of 2006 — the Virtual Public School Program, the Lifelong Learning Commission and the wellness curriculum (§§37-161-1 to 37-161-7). It has nothing to do with student data.
What Mississippi actually has is two failed bills. A "Mississippi Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act" — the ALEC model statute that became law in Oklahoma as 70 O.S. §3-168 and in Tennessee as §§49-1-701 to 708 — was introduced twice and died in committee both times:
| Bill | Session | Disposition |
|---|---|---|
| SB 2752 | 2014 Regular | Dead — died in Senate Education, 4 February 2014 |
| SB 2777 | 2015 Regular | Dead |
So for a Mississippi district the operative layer is FERPA, the district's own contract terms, and — for any service in its scope — the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act, which is a minors' online-safety statute rather than a student-records one and binds providers directly.
Not a blocker
This instrument sat in the old coverage backlog as "Miss. Code on LexisNexis, browser-only". That was true and beside the point: the codified Mississippi Code is indeed unreachable — Justia and FindLaw answer this network with 403, and advance.lexis.com serves a JavaScript bootstrap — but there was no statute at the cited place to extract. The evidence above comes from the Legislature's own bill-status system, which answers directly.
Two lessons worth keeping, both of which generalise:
- Verify the citation before diagnosing the route. A whole blocker row rested on a citation nobody had checked against the source.
- The legislature publishes the acts even where the code is behind a publisher. billstatus.ls.state.ms.us serves enrolled bill text as plain HTML; that is how the Walker Montgomery Act reached the corpus as a primary source.
Licence
This research note reproduces no statute text. What it quotes is bill-status data (dispositions and last actions) from the Mississippi Legislature's own history records, which are facts and legislative records outside copyright. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." (slip opinion, p. 1, read 2026-10-01.)
Justia's index of Mississippi Code Title 37, Chapter 161 is cited only for what the chapter contains; no Justia text is reproduced, so its terms do not bear on the label.
No conditions apply. The Sources section links each record.
Related
- Mississippi — Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act — what Mississippi does regulate
- Alabama — student data governance — the corpus's other "no dedicated statute" finding
- Oklahoma Student DATA Act · Tennessee §§49-1-701 to 708 — the same model bill where it did pass
Sources
- Mississippi Legislature — SB 2752 (2014) bill history
- Mississippi Legislature — SB 2777 (2015) bill history
- Justia — Mississippi Code Title 37, Chapter 161 — third-party reproduction, cited only to show what Chapter 161 contains