It takes a village to raise a child. Empowering schools and their partners with all the tools needed to engage with families.
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2014
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Your SIS captures consent once, at enrollment, behind a parent login. The new Texas laws ask a different question: is this student cleared for this specific program, today. The tool isn't missing. It was built for a job that ended at enrollment.
SB 12 reads like one consent requirement. Inside a district it's several: a nurse checking a family's decision before a health service, a counselor checking consent before a screening, each pulling a different cut of the same data. The form was the easy part.
134 AI-in-education bills across 31 states this session (MultiState). The FTC's 2025 COPPA amendments were the federal floor. The state layer is coming in fast.
The one to watch: California AB 1159 includes a private right of action. That turns parents into enforcers, not just state AGs and the FTC.
2012. 2013. 2023. OCR keeps resolving the same complaint: consent goes out in English, no process to check which families need translation.
actionaly.com/our-blog/multi…
SB 12 made club participation opt-in. Per student, per club. A district with several hundred clubs now needs an active consent on file before a student walks into a meeting. Most districts handled health services first. Clubs are quieter, and the volume is bigger.
COPPA 2026 turned into an inventory test. The vendor inbox wave is flagging which vendors do things school consent never covered. Districts without a current vendor list can't read the answer.
actionaly.com/blog/coppa-202…
Health consent in Skyward. Club consent on a Google Form. Sensitive content on paper. SCOPE Act vendor authorizations in a shared drive.
"Can this student participate today?" shouldn't take 20 minutes and three systems to answer.
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Teens with major depression got treatment 9 points less often in states requiring parental consent (37%) than in states without (46%).
Refusal is rare. The gap is workflow: paths longer than the window to ask for help.
JAMA Pediatrics, Dec 2024.
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HB 1605 flipped Texas sex ed consent from opt-out to opt-in.
Before: track the 15 families who said no.
After: chase consent from hundreds. Every grade. Every year.
Same staff, same families. The default changed everything.
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First full school year under SB 12 is wrapping up.
If asked for a complete record of every consent decision this year, how long would it take?
Districts with dedicated tracking: minutes. Spreadsheets and SIS fields: days.
Year-end is when gaps surface.
29% response rate under active consent. 7 out of 10 families need someone to follow up.
In most districts, that's one person already doing a dozen other things. The families aren't unwilling. They're busy.
4-page consent form: 64% returned signed.
3-page version, similar schools: 81%.
One fewer page. 17 more points.
Form design isn't a polish item. It's consent infrastructure.
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Opt-out: silence means yes. Opt-in: silence means no.
HB 1605 rewrote one sentence of Texas law and reversed the operational workflow for every health services team in the state. Student services now chases responses, not exceptions.
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29% vs 75%+.
The gap between consent response rates with manual follow-up and automated multi-channel reminders. Same families, same forms, different workflow.
"Can Skyward just handle this?"
For annual enrollment packets, yes. For whether a nurse can do today's screening, no. The SIS runs on annual cycles. Program-level consent doesn't.
actionaly.com/our-blog/why-y…
"Pull the consent records for the counseling program."
That board-packet question is a multi-hour scavenger hunt in most districts: spreadsheets, paper files, SIS, Google Forms. When consent lives as a per-student record, pulling the report takes minutes.