FERPA
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects the privacy of student education records. For language services, FERPA requires that interpreters and translators working with student records be treated as 'school officials' with a 'legitimate educational interest' — which in practice means they must sign confidentiality agreements before receiving any student data and treat records under the same access controls as district staff.
FERPA-aligned workflows include: per-engagement confidentiality agreements signed before document access, encrypted-at-rest data storage, access control logging, and segregated translation memory so one district's IEP terminology never appears in another district's translations.
FERPA violations can result in loss of federal education funding under ESSA. School districts contracting for language services should confirm that vendors maintain FERPA-aligned workflows and can produce confidentiality agreements on request.