EdLaw
Puerto Rico — Ley 85-2018, Artículo 1.05 (expedientes escolares)
The school-records provision of Puerto Rico's education reform act (Ley de Reforma Educativa, 3 L.P.R.A. § 9801d) — the local sibling of FERPA. Puerto Rico's public schools are federally funded, so FERPA applies of its own force alongside this Article; Art. 1.05 adds the local custody, content and confidentiality regime.
Statute text is Spanish (the authentic language); this README is curation.
Applicability to EdTech
- School directors are the responsible custodians of student records, whose statutory content catalogue includes contact data, grades and assessment results, health conditions and vaccination certificates, disciplinary and attendance reports, and IEPs (informes del PEI) for special-education students (Art. 1.05).
- Records are confidential by default — the exceptions are sharing between government agencies/educational institutions within their functions "según las limitaciones y requisitos impuestos por las leyes aplicables" (which pulls FERPA in), and court orders. Records must stay current and transferable when a student moves school or jurisdiction.
- School data flows, with student identity safeguarded, into the Departamento de Educación's Sistema de Datos Longitudinal (definición 50) — the state longitudinal data system any deep DE-PR integration would touch.
- Practical consequence for a platform holding PR student data: it is processing parts of the expediente escolar on the school's behalf, so contracts should mirror the confidentiality duty the director carries.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| EXPEDIENTES-ESCOLARES.md | Art. 1.05 in full + Art. 1.03 definición 50 (Sistema de Datos Longitudinal) |
Scope note: Ley 85-2018 is the full education code (121 pages in the current OGP compilation); only the records provisions are curated here. Add further articles (e.g. governance, Escuelas Públicas Alianza) when a question needs them.
Enforcement
Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico (the Secretario regulates); confidentiality breaches would also engage Ley 111-2005 notification duties — its "entidad" definition expressly covers educational institutions.
Licence
The reproduced text is Article 1.05 of Ley 85-2018, as amended, enacted by the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico, in its authentic Spanish, from the consolidated PDF of the Oficina de Gerencia y Presupuesto (OGP) Biblioteca Virtual. The Copyright Act applies in Puerto Rico, and with it the government edicts doctrine. No copyright subsists in this text. 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." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)
The OGP PDF carries no copyright notice (checked in full). Its closing note describes the compilation and claims nothing over it: "Nota. Este documento fue compilado por personal de la Oficina de Gerencia y Presupuesto del Gobierno de Puerto Rico, como un medio de alertar a los usuarios de nuestra Biblioteca de las últimas enmiendas aprobadas para esta Ley." The note says the italic bracketed annotations OGP adds "no forman parte de la Ley"; the corpus reproduces none of them.
No translation is reproduced. The text is Spanish as enacted; the English in the README is the corpus's own summary, not a translation by any other body.
Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line on each section names the publisher, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that OGP or the Legislative Assembly endorses the corpus.
Related
- US FERPA — applies directly to PR's federally funded schools
- PR Ley 111-2005 — breach notification
- PR Ley 185-2024 — children's online privacy