School Community Data Sharing Guide

Our platforms provide your school with several features to support parents' engagement and empowerment in online safety. These features are driven by increasing demands from school communities for visibility and influence, and the dual obligation of schools and parents to work together to keep children safe in and outside school.

The purpose of this guide is to provide school administrators with information and guidance to support their important decisions concerning sharing data with parents.

What data can School Manager share with parents?

School Manager allows schools to share Weekly Summaries and detailed Timelines of children’s online activities with parents of Connected Students through Qustodio.

Weekly Summary

The Weekly Summary shows a summary of internet domains and mobile apps a student has used over the past seven days. Qustodio shows the Summary on the parent’s User Dashboard.

Timeline Activities

The Timeline shows details of student internet activity in the past 30 days. Your school has a range of Timeline Sharing options. You can choose to share or not each type and share any blocked activity of each type.

Who should make decisions on sharing school data?

Sharing student data with parents is subject to data protection regulations and impacts student safety. We recommend that executive management should make data-sharing decisions.

When setting data sharing policies, what factors should you consider?

You should consider several factors when deciding what, if any, data to share with parents:

• Laws: Local laws and regulations relating to school data, rights of parents and rights of students to agency/privacy.
• Risks: If data sharing may create unnecessary concerns for parents, or put students at risk.
• Benefits: If sharing of data will benefit students, parents or the broader community with online safety.
• Expectations: The school community’s expectations regarding sharing of student data.

Our team is available on request to help you with this analysis.

How should we communicate with parents and students?

We have consistently found that schools achieve the best outcomes with the least conflict when they communicate openly and sincerely about their safety programs and systems' aims, benefits and limitations. You want your parents and students to feel involved in a shared safety journey every step of the way.
In particular, we suggest:

• informing parents and students of the planned measure and options available to participate, opt out, or raise concerns before enabling data sharing with parents; and
• where schools choose not to share specific data (e.g., blocked online activity), you communicate the institution's reasoning to parents.

Can parents choose to opt out of receiving data?

Yes. Parents are opted out by default. They must actively opt in by connecting to their students using the Qustodio App. Parents can ask you to disconnect them from their student or they can change their email address on their Qustodio account to stop receiving data.

What options do students have if they are concerned about data sharing with their parents?

If students are worried about their data being shared with their parents by the school, they should contact the school first. We recommend this and will not notify the school or parents of these requests. Additionally, we suggest having a plan in case students raise concerns at your school.

Schools can enable a child's request by permanently disabling the connection of Qustodio to their student account.

Why does student data show visits to websites they don't have access to?

Student data may show students visiting websites that they don't have access to, such as Facebook, Pinterest or YouTube. This is because some websites use third-party services provided by these sites for authentication, caching, and advertising. Even though we try to filter out such data, it may still appear in the student's records. Similar situations occur with other websites that use third-party services.