EdLaw nat/us/state/wi/pupil-records/README.md

language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Wisconsin pupil records (Wis. Stat. §118.125)

Wisconsin's statute governing the confidentiality of pupil records, sitting alongside FERPA for Wisconsin districts. It binds the school board and the school, not vendors directly — a supplier meets it through the district's own confidentiality policy and through the contract. The section was created by Chapter 254, Laws of 1973 (1973 Assembly Bill 573, published 8 June 1974), which took effect on 9 June 1974 — the date the statute itself substitutes for "the effective date of this act" in §118.125(6) — and whose section 3 made it first apply from the beginning of the following school year.

Applicability to EdTech

There is no operator-facing duty here of the SOPIPA kind: §118.125 makes all pupil records confidential in the school's hands and then enumerates the permitted disclosures (§118.125(2)). A vendor matters only insofar as a disclosure to it is one the statute permits, and the school board must adopt policies to maintain confidentiality and may not release records outside those paragraphs.

Two provisions shape retention design rather than access: behavioral records may not be kept more than one year after the pupil ceases to be enrolled, unless the pupil and parent consent (§118.125(3)), and records transfer to a receiving school no later than the next working day (§118.125(4)).

The definitions are the load-bearing part for classification: "pupil records", "behavioral records", "progress records", "pupil physical health records", "directory data" and the law-enforcement-unit terms are each separately defined (§118.125(1)), and the categories carry different disclosure rules.

Key obligations at a glance

Contents

Document Covers
PUPIL-RECORDS.md §118.125 in full — definitions, confidentiality and the enumerated disclosures, pupil physical health records, maintenance and destruction, transfer, use in discipline proceedings, existing records, and law enforcement unit records

Licence

The reproduced text is Wis. Stat. §118.125, enacted by the Wisconsin Legislature and published by the Legislative Reference Bureau on docs.legis.wisconsin.gov, which states that the statutes are "Published and certified under s. 35.18." 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.)

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Sources