FERPA Compliance

AgenticED, Inc.
Effective Date: October 13, 2026

This page is written for the people at a district who have to approve us: a privacy officer, a general counsel, a chief information officer, or a records custodian. It states our position under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, including the parts that constrain us.

Our Position: School Official Under Direct Control

AgenticED receives education records from school districts and acts as a school official with a legitimate educational interest under FERPA's school official exception, 34 C.F.R. § 99.31(a)(1)(i)(B).

That exception carries four conditions. We meet each one because the district's agreement with us requires it.

We perform a service the district would otherwise perform itself. Coordinating which systems may reach student data, estimating benefit and aid eligibility, showing academic signals to the educators responsible for a student, and keeping the record of who changed or received what. Districts do this work today, usually by hand.

We are under the district's direct control in how education records are used and maintained. The district decides which data elements we receive. The district decides which agents may reach them, at what scope, and under what conditions, and the gateway enforces that decision. The district decides who at the district may see what, through a role and consent configuration the district administers. The district can revoke any of it, and revocation takes effect in the platform itself, without a support request. We cannot grant ourselves access the district has not granted, and access to student records is enforced by policies in the database as well as in our application.

We use education records only for the authorized purpose. We have no secondary business that could use them. We sell no advertising and we have no data product.

We do not redisclose. Section 99.33(a) prohibits a school official from redisclosing personally identifiable information from an education record except on the district's behalf and authority. We redisclose only to the service providers named in our Privacy Policy, each bound to equivalent obligations and each acting on the district's authorized purpose.

Our Obligations

Records Remain the District's

The district is the custodian. We hold a copy to operate the service. We claim no ownership, no license beyond the authorized purpose, and no right to keep anything after the district tells us to stop.

We Support Parent Inspection and Amendment

A parent's FERPA rights are exercised through the district. When a district receives a request to inspect or amend a record, we produce what we hold, in a usable form, on the district's instruction.

We produce the complete contents of a student's record as we hold it within ten business days of the district's request, which leaves the district time to answer within FERPA's forty-five-day window. We produce the full record, not a summary or a dashboard export.

We Honor Amendment Outcomes

If a district amends a record after a parent challenge, the amendment reaches us. Most of what we hold originated in the district's own systems, so correcting it at the source corrects it with us through the normal integration. Where we generated something, such as an eligibility estimate or a value extracted from a document, we correct it directly on the district's instruction.

We Keep the Record of Disclosures

Section 99.32 requires a district to record each request for and disclosure of personally identifiable information from an education record to parties outside the district, and to make that record available to the parent.

Our platform records those disclosures. Each time a vendor or agent reads district data through the gateway, each time data is sent to a community partner, and each time a pseudonymization key is used, a log entry records who received it, what was disclosed, when, and the consent or authorization behind it. Every change to a record is also written to our audit log with the actor, the actor's role, the action, the resource, the time, the originating address, and the result.

The audit log is hash-chained: each entry carries the hash of the one before it and a sequence number, so an entry cannot be altered or removed without breaking the chain. A database constraint makes it impossible to write an entry with no identified actor.

When a parent asks a district which outside parties received their child's information, the district can answer from these records.

We Return or Destroy Data on Direction

When a district's agreement ends, or whenever the district directs, we return or destroy the data. The mechanism is Exhibit D of our Data Processing Agreement.

Destruction in our platform is a true deletion. Records are removed from more than sixty tables in a single operation that either completes or changes nothing, and the district receives a receipt naming what was deleted, the counts, and each kind of record deliberately kept, with the reason for each.

The records we keep by default are the audit and consent records, and we want a district's counsel to see our reasoning. The disclosure record exists so a parent can establish who received their child's information. If we destroy it along with the data, we destroy the parent's ability to establish that, and the district's evidence that it complied. So by default we keep the proof of authorized access, for the retention period in our Privacy Policy, and we tell the district we are doing so. A district may direct us to destroy those records as well, and we will, subject to the district's own records retention obligations.

We Support the District's Annual Notice

FERPA requires a district to notify parents each year of their rights and of the criteria it uses to designate school officials. A district naming us in that notice may use or adapt this paragraph:

The District uses AgenticED, Inc. to coordinate access to student information by approved educational software, to help families find and apply for financial aid, benefits, and opportunities, and to keep a record of who receives student information. AgenticED acts as a school official with a legitimate educational interest under the District's direct control. It may use student information only for the services the District has authorized, and it may not disclose that information to anyone else except as the District directs or as the law requires.

Directory Information

We do not treat any data we receive as directory information, and we do not disclose anything as directory information. If a district designates elements as directory information under § 99.37, that designation governs the district's own disclosures. Our use stays limited to the authorized purpose either way.

Questions Where the Analysis Is Harder

A district's counsel needs our position on the harder questions as well as the easy ones.

Information a parent volunteers that is not in the district's record. Families tell our agents things the district never collected: a housing situation, a work schedule, a concern about a child. We treat content about the student that we maintain for the district as an education record and apply the same protections, including the parent's rights to inspect and amend it and the district's control over its retention and deletion.

Health information inside education records. Where health information appears within a special education or Section 504 plan, it is an education record under FERPA and we treat it as one. We are not a HIPAA business associate, we hold no protected health information under HIPAA, and the platform has no health record or health field.

Meal program eligibility. Free and reduced-price meal eligibility carries redisclosure limits under the National School Lunch Act that are narrower than FERPA's. We apply the narrower limit.

Pseudonymized data. JustData produces pseudonymized and longitudinal views for a district's own analysis. Section 99.31(b) permits disclosure of de-identified records, but our implementation keeps a re-identification key so that a student's records can be linked across years. Because we hold that key, we treat this data as personally identifiable and fully protected, and we do not describe it as de-identified. Each use of the key is logged, and re-identifying a record requires a separately authorized and logged action.

AI processing. Education record content is sent to our AI providers to operate the service, under terms that do not permit them to train on it. That is a disclosure to a school official's contractor acting on the district's authorized purpose, which § 99.33 permits, and it is why the service provider list in our Privacy Policy is a FERPA disclosure and not a courtesy.

Contact

AgenticED, Inc.
Attn: Chief Compliance Officer
240 West 136th Street
New York, NY 10030
privacy@agenticed.com

A district privacy officer or counsel who writes to us with a FERPA question gets a direct answer from a person who can commit the company.

For independent guidance, the U.S. Department of Education's Student Privacy Policy Office publishes resources for districts at studentprivacy.ed.gov and will answer a district's questions directly.