ferpa

What This Skill Does

The FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) skill for OpenClaw acts as an intelligent compliance assistant designed to help developers, administrators, and educational stakeholders navigate the complexities of student data privacy. It provides immediate access to the regulatory framework governing education records, defining what information is protected, when it can be disclosed, and what rights parents and eligible students maintain regarding their data. The skill simplifies legal research by offering structured access to official definitions, consent protocols, and institutional requirements through a direct command-line interface, ensuring that technology deployments and record management processes remain compliant with federal law.

Installation

To integrate the FERPA compliance tool into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/bytesagain1/ferpa

Once installed, you can configure the data directory by setting the FERPA_DIR environment variable to point to your preferred storage location (default is ~/.ferpa/). Ensure your environment is updated to recognize the new skill binaries.

Use Cases

1. Software Development: Building an EdTech platform and need to understand if your database schema or data-sharing logic violates student privacy laws.
2. Administrative Policy: Advising school staff on whether a specific student record request meets the criteria for disclosure without written consent.
3. Compliance Audits: Generating a comprehensive compliance checklist to evaluate current institutional protocols for handling sensitive directory information or cloud-based storage services.
4. Student Advocacy: Determining if a specific disciplinary record or academic document qualifies as an "education record" under FERPA, thereby granting the student rights to review and amend it.

Example Prompts

1. "@ferpa check exceptions: Under what circumstances can we share a student's grades with an outside researcher without obtaining parental consent?"
2. "@ferpa technology: Provide a summary of the compliance requirements for integrating a third-party cloud analytics tool into our existing LMS platform."
3. "@ferpa checklist: Generate a step-by-step audit checklist for our registrar's office to ensure we are correctly handling directory information requests."

Tips & Limitations

• Regulatory Guidance: This skill provides information based on FERPA guidelines but does not constitute formal legal advice. Always consult with your institution's legal counsel before implementing data sharing policies.
• Scope: The skill focuses exclusively on the federal FERPA statute. Be aware that state-specific privacy laws may provide additional layers of protection or stricter requirements that are not covered here.
• Data Updates: Regularly run the version command to ensure your reference database is up-to-date with the latest regulatory interpretations or guidance from the Department of Education.