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How Long Do You Keep Student Data/Accounts?

Jess Moxsky

Hello! This is more of a product-agnostic question, but I would love to pick the brains of all you lovely K12 folks: How long after students or faculty leave do you keep their accounts (Google, Microsoft, etc) and for how long after they leave do you store their files from Google Drive, OneDrive, etc? We are working on formalizing our onboarding and offboarding procedures and would love to hear about what other schools are doing! Happy Thursday ?

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Brian Gray

We do not delete Google accounts when students or employees leave the school. We turn off access by changing the password, but we keep the accounts. There are three reasons:

If we delete the account, any files shared by that user would be lost. We could transfer Drive content to a generic account before deleting the user account, but that would make it much harder to find a particular file later.
A surprising number of students and employees return to the school later. Students re-enroll after a year away and families change their minds about returning over the summer. Employees return as long-term subs or un-retire. Alums return as employees.
We encourage departing people to set a forwarding email address on the account. That allows recent graduates to get email sent to the school account, and it allows any user to get password reset emails for accounts that used the school email address.

We change passwords for students who do not return (alums and others) on August 1.

Accounts on other services are deleted. The general timeline is that we remove departing professional staff and non-returning students on August 1, or when they leave mid-year.

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

@Jess Moxley I echo everything that Brian Gray posted!

Jess Moxsky

Fantastic, Brian!

I believe we also deactivate rather than delete Google accounts, as we've had the same phenomenon of folks returning or needing files they forgot to transfer over. One of our biggest issues with Google specifically is that files in Google Drive are user-based and not organization-based. It would be amazing if Google functioned a bit more like OneDrive in that respect.

We also encourage students to update external accounts with their personal emails at the end of senior year so they can continue to access their files and services after graduation if need be. How do you handle 3rd party sites (think things like Padlet?) and retention of student data?

Thank you so much! It's so fantastic to be able to pick peoples' brains here in the community

Morgan Kunze

Great topic! We handle Google accounts similarly to Brian, and like you we ask students to transition to a personal email after leaving but retain their accounts in the database. I'd like to piggyback on this question by asking how long y'all keep records in admission for students who inquire or apply but do not enroll. I'd love to tidy up our database by purging records for people who never actually entered a relationship with the school!

Jess Moxsky

Morgan Kunze:
Great topic! We handle Google accounts similarly to Brian, and like you we ask students to transition to a personal email after leaving but retain their accounts in the database. I'd like to piggyback on this question by asking how long y'all keep records in admission for students who inquire or apply but do not enroll. I'd love to tidy up our database by purging records for people who never actually entered a relationship with the school!

Thank you, Morgan! We deactivate candidates who do not enroll and make them “past candidates”, and we have not used Enrollment Management long enough to have records we need to purge. Since we are a 7-12 we assume some applicants who do not end up enrolling in 7th grade may likely come back and apply for 9th.

Josceline Reardon

@Brian Gray
You always have wonderful advice! I'm wondering if you backup your employee Gmail & Drive. If so, how long after they leave, would you archive and/or delete the backup? The space needed to continue to backup our employees Gmail & Drive is continuing to grow, which means the expense is increasing as well. Thanks for your help. If you have an employee data retention policy that you would care to share, I'd be interested!!

Thank you in advance!

Brian Gray

@Josceline Reardon - We use Spanning.com to back up Google products for all active accounts (students, employee, and role accounts - TechSupport@, Admission@, etc). They charge a fee per person and we get unlimited backup storage for each user. (Ask each company you consider for a quote - the sticker prices usually don't apply to schools.)

We remove the Spanning license for each user when they leave the school. Removing the license deletes the backup data stored by Spanning for that user.

In addition to the Spanning backup for active users, Google Vault will give you access to stored data for Gmail, Drive, Groups, and Chat (depending on your school’s retention rules in Vault).

I can’t discuss our Vault retention policies.

Josceline Reardon

@Jess Moxsky
We also make candidates inactive if they do not enroll, unless they might be a good candidate for a future admission year. We are 6weeks old through 12th grade, so sometimes candidates will reapply for a future grade.