Governing Education Data in the Cloud: FERPA, Privacy & Analytics on AWS

6:30 - Socialization and Food!
6:45 - Welcome and Announcements
6:50 - Host Welcome
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A K-12 perspective from both sides of the table: the boardroom and the architecture diagram
K-12 districts now run data operations most enterprises would recognize: cloud-based SIS and LMS platforms, 200+ EdTech apps per district, and student records moving through vendor pipelines nobody fully tracks.
One in three districts reported a data incident in the past two years. The trust burden lands on elected school boards who’ve never opened the AWS console.
Rob Cochrane sits on both sides of this problem. He is the elected School Board President at Tipton Community Schools, a rural Indiana district, and leads Data Governance work at E-gineering, where he helps organizations move sensitive data into the cloud responsibly.
This session walks through a four-pillar governance framework, classify, restrict, trace, retire, built for K-12 budgets and boardrooms. He'll map each pillar to concrete AWS services (Macie, Lake Formation, CloudTrail, S3 Lifecycle Policies), then walk through three real district use cases: SIS modernization, early-warning learning analytics, and taming a 240-app EdTech vendor sprawl.
Attendees leave with a working framework, three questions everyone should be able to answer in public, and a 12-month roadmap districts or companies can act on without a data team or a blank-check budget.
7:30 - Q&A, Discussion