Suppression and Complementary Suppression Summary

The DataVista adheres to the privacy requirements in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974 along with other best practices in order to protect students’ right to privacy. FERPA is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records and pertains to the release of and access to educational records or any information directly related to a student that are maintained by an educational institution or agency or other party acting on their behalf. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under applicable programs of the US Department of Education.  

The California convention for protecting personally identifiable data is that information for groups of less than 10 students may not be reported in aggregated tables. For DataVista additional practices have been adopted from Federal guidelines as well as from other states such as Texas including complementary suppression. Complementary suppression rules are applied in cases where using simple subtraction from the total could allow viewers to back into the suppressed low value count of a group.