Privacy Policy
At Forefront Education, we take the security of student information very seriously. Forefront Education supports teachers, schools, and districts by providing a web-based platform known as Forefront® that manages, organizes, stores, and creates assessment result reports. The company also supports districts that leverage student assessment results for instructional decision making and monitoring the implementation of instructional curricula.
Student and Teacher Information
Your educational organization uses Forefront Education’s services to manage and visualize classroom assessment results. A full list of the data collected in Forefront and its purposes are shared below:
| Non-Student Entity Fields | |
| Class ID |
Used by the rostering system to identify classes.
|
| School Name | Used to help users identify schools |
| School ID |
Used by the rostering system to identify schools.
|
| Class Course |
This is the course that a particular class is a member of. It is used to organize data for district administrators and allow the district leadership to provide assessments to the classroom.
|
| Class School | Used for organization of classes. |
| Information on Users (District Employees) | |
| Access Time |
Used internally to understand how users are interacting with the system.
|
| First and last names |
Allow the resources (such as classes) that are linked to a teacher to be named as such (e.g. Smith’s First Grade Math). It also allows district administrators to easily identify users.
|
| Emails |
For login purposes, and communication about system when necessary
|
| Roles |
Controls access rights to data within system.
|
| School Associations |
Allows district administrators to manage classrooms from multiple schools
|
| Class Associations |
Allows teachers to find the kids they are teaching.
|
| IP Address |
It is stored in server access logs, but is not linked to a user account in any way.
|
| Information on Students | |
| Student First Name |
Used to identify students to the teachers using the software
|
| Student Last Name |
Used to identify students to the teachers using the software
|
| Student ID (SIS or other) |
Displayed to users for identification, but primarily used for ensuring that rostering works from year to year.
|
| Demographic information (optional) Gender, Race, Ethnicity, English Language Acquisition Status) |
Used in the reporting system to break down students by those demographics.
All of these are optional, and provided at the district level, and so can be easily omitted. |
| Class Association |
Allows teachers to have groups of students.
|
| Student Assessment Score |
This is core to the primary purpose of the software, scores on assessments (at the question level) are stored
so that we can compute proficiencies on the relevant standards. These scores are timestamped both with when they were entered (automatically) and when the teacher says the data was collected (set by teacher). |
| Student Assessment Score Timestamp |
Allow the system to time based weighting of scores entered.
|
| Teacher Note |
For free form notes that the teacher might find relevant. These notes are available for anyone with read access to the student to see.
The Notes can consist of written text, or images/video. Nothing automatic is done here. |
| Teacher Note Timestamp |
Just a record of when the note was taken, used to display back to the user.
|
| Student Standard Point in Time Snapshots |
Used by the report card assistant to allow teachers to note the standards proficiency of a student at a given point in time.
|
| Progress toward proficiency related to standards |
Calculated internally using assessment scores entered by teachers. These values are not stored, but rather calculated upon request.
|
| Global Aggregates |
Used to provide customers to an aggregate of the data across all users of the system to data for a particular assessment.
Can be opted out at the district level is so desired. |
If any information in Forefront is found to be erroneous, parents, guardians or eligible students should contact their school about getting that information corrected.
Data Security and Privacy
Forefront Education adheres to the Family Education and Privacy Act, as codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1232, also known as FERPA, and is a signatory of the Student Privacy Pledge.
Our company has in place technical and organizational measures to protect against unauthorized or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data. All data that is unique to our software, such as student scores on assessments, is stored in such a way that it cannot be deleted. This data is append only. Users within the system are given a role which restricts access to only the data that is relevant to them.
In the case of a data breach, Forefront Education has in place a Data Breach Protocol. The company would disclose what information was breached within 72 hours of our learning of it, contacting all accounts with the relevant information for them to further inform the impacted individuals.
Forefront Education has in place Disaster Recovery procedures to ensure that data can be restored without error. The company maintains daily full PostgreSQL snapshots for a period of 3 months. Monthly, the company performs a recovery of a snapshot to ensure that they are restored without error. The backups are managed by AWS RDS. The company maintains backups for 3 months and can restore a specific client’s data from a backup if needed.
When an educational organization terminates their Forefront subscription, they can request to have their data permanently deleted. Following this request, all the above-mentioned student and teacher information is permanently deleted within 30 days.
Third Party Partners and Others
Forefront is used exclusively by school districts and their staff members for educational purposes. Students and parents do not have direct access to the program. The student data is retained only for education purposes.
Forefront Education does not analyze student data for marketing purposes and never shares personal student information with anyone who does. Forefront does not share any data with third-party companies for commercial purposes. The following third party partners receive student data:
- Amazon AWS is used for web hosting services for our cloud-based solution.
- Redis Labs is a database provider used to solve for persisting user sessions. No student information is stored with Redis Labs.
Information Collected from our Marketing Website
Separate from the web-based platform known as Forefront®, our company maintains an external-facing website at forefront.education. This marketing website is maintained on a separate server managed by GreenHostCo. No information about students or users is shared between Forefront® and our marketing website.
When marketing website visitors visit forefront.education, our servers automatically gather information from your browser, such as your IP address. Collecting IP addresses is standard practice and generally done automatically. The server for our external-facing website may also track additional information, including but not limited to: the pages of our website that you visit, the browser you are using, and the operating system of your computer or mobile device. Our company uses the third-party service Google Analytics to collect and analyze this marketing website visitor data. We use this information to calculate usage levels and improve our marketing website.
If you share information through a contact form on our website, including, but not limited to, name, phone number, email address, and job title, this information may be used by our marketing, sales, or customer support departments to contact you. This information will never be shared with any third-party companies, including our publishing partners. If you wish to be removed from a contact list, you may request to have this information removed at any time.
