Student Data Protection
Parents rightly demand that their children’s health data be protected. This is required legally under HIPPA and other laws & regulations, and also by Healthy Students Healthy State.
It is important that parents understand that individual child health data will not be shared outside the school—and that even within the school, individual health data can only be seen by a small number of staff with a need to know and who are authorized to see those data, with parental informed consent.
Only the student’s health and physical education teacher, and the school nurse or other staff such as a school counselor, who are specifically authorized to review student health data because they have a need to know, can review fitness or other health evaluation data developed during their courses at school. (In elementary or middle school, this may include the student’s main/homeroom teacher and the principal.)
If that teacher, counselor, school nurse, or administrator wishes to share individual student health-related data with any non-authorized staff, the school staff needs to get a parent’s consent.
By the same token, if the student has a health condition, which certain staff such as the physical education teacher should know about, then the parent or guardian should share that information with the school and the relevant teacher or other staff. That teacher will be required to maintain the confidentiality of that data.
For example, if a student has asthma, then the PE teacher should know that, since the student will be engaging in moderate and vigorous physical activity.
In order for student data to be reported outside the school under Healthy Students Healthy State, it must be aggregated with other students’ data—at a minimum, averaged together with all the other students in the same class. These data may never be provided as individual data, even if those data have been “de-identified”. This prevents any individual data from being traced back and connected to a particular individual student.