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Committee presses vendors on student data in literacy programs and career‑exploration games
Summary
The Finance and Operations Committee reviewed three data-sharing proposals—Boundless Literacy/Reed Charitable model school, a Yale Child Study Center attendance study, and Skiller Games career simulations—and pressed staff to confirm whether contractors will only receive deidentified data and whether aliasing/parental consent can be enforced for middle‑school users.
The New Haven School District’s Finance and Operations Committee reviewed three data‑sharing proposals and raised privacy questions about student identifiers and personally identifiable information.
Mr. Nen described a partnership with Boundless Literacy and the Reed Charitable Foundation to create a model literacy school at Bishop Woods and said the partners would like access to deidentified early-literacy assessment data to evaluate program effectiveness. "They've offered to train our teachers at Bishop Woods specifically to create a model school for literacy," Mr. Nen said, framing the data request as part of a professional‑learning partnership.
Assistant Superintendent Dagger described a separate study from the Yale Child Study Center, led by researcher Sophie Lmber, which would compare 10 chronically absent students and 10 non‑chronically absent students at Metropolitan Business School. "The goal is to generate actionable recommendations and steps to support kids in engagement," Dagger said; the study received IRB approval and staff said the contractor will primarily use deidentified building‑level comparisons, with interviews and follow‑up recommendations to district and school staff.
Committee attention focused most sharply on Skiller Games, a career‑exploration platform for middle‑school students that the district said collects emails, usernames, birthdates, zip codes and optional names to personalize pathways. Miss Tran explained the platform’s four simulations and the kinds of usage and assessment data it reports. Committee members pushed the district to minimize collection of personally identifiable information for students under 13 and to require aliases where personalization is not mission‑critical.
"In every scenario, we should not share what we don't have to share," one committee member said, urging an alias or anonymized account requirement for student users. Members asked staff to seek confirmation from the Skiller Games vendor about whether students can create aliases and whether parental opt‑out would be implemented; staff agreed to reach out and report back before the item is taken to the full board.
The committee also asked for clearer indication in future contract documents of what changes vendors make to template forms and requested that staff mark where the district portion of costs will appear on public postings for agreements involving outside funding (for example, E‑Rate support). The committee held the Skiller Games item pending vendor responses; the Boundless Literacy and Yale study items moved forward to the full board as part of the packet the committee forwarded.
What’s next: Staff will request written confirmation from Skiller Games about aliasing and parental consent procedures, return findings to the committee and annotate shared forms to highlight vendor edits and the district cost share where required.
