At Orange Grove Charter School (OGCS), students will be using a variety of online web applications as a resource to enhance their learning experience. Although these applications are widely used by the education community and support their use in K-12 institutions, their Terms of Service state that due to Federal Law any users must obtain explicit parental permission to use their sites. All websites and tools have been and will continue to be thoroughly examined by experienced educators and are used commonly in education today, but new tools arise every day.

Under fed­eral law titled the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), these web­sites must pro­vide parental noti­fi­ca­tion and obtain parental con­sent before col­lect­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion from chil­dren. For more information on COPPA, please visit https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/complying-coppa-frequently-asked-questions. The law per­mits schools such as ours to con­sent to the col­lec­tion of per­sonal infor­ma­tion on behalf of all of its stu­dents, thereby elim­i­nat­ing the need for indi­vid­ual parental con­sent given directly.  Before doing so, the school is providing you with this notice and opportunity to opt out.  

In order for Orange Grove Charter School (OGCS) to con­tinue to be able to pro­vide your stu­dent with the most effec­tive web-based tools and appli­ca­tions for learn­ing, they need to abide by fed­eral reg­u­la­tions that require a parental sig­na­ture as out­lined below. Our district uti­lizes sev­eral com­puter soft­ware appli­ca­tions and web-based ser­vices, oper­ated not by this school, but by third par­ties. These include Google Apps for Education (GAFE), Prezi, IXL, Custom Typing, Google Classroom, and sim­i­lar edu­ca­tional pro­grams. A com­plete list of the pro­grams with the pri­vacy pol­icy for each can be found on the application link below.

In order for our stu­dents to use these pro­grams and ser­vices, cer­tain per­sonal iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion -- the student’s name and email address -- must be pro­vided at the end of this form. Your student, where applicable, will receive a Google email account to participate in the Google Apps for Education program used by OGCS.