Schools serving undocumented kids go underground

Link: Jo Naplitano at The 74, published in The 19th.

It's heartening to see educators take their responsibilities as stewards of children's wellbeing seriously in this environment, potentially to their own detriment. But it's undeniably depressing to be in a place where public educators feel they need to hide from the government to keep their students safe:

"Schools and other organizations serving undocumented students are taking their activities underground, fearful of revealing all they do to help newcomers navigate life in America — lest they be targeted and shuttered by the Trump administration."

The result is a curbing of their democratic speech outwardly - no criticisms of Trump or advocacy for diversity - while using end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and not putting anything in writing.

These needs are common across a whole swathe of organizations that seek to avoid scrutiny from the administration. It's a place where the cloud is not serving organizations: the fear is that data and communications can be seized without an organization's knowledge. But self-hosted, encrypted apps remain too hard to install and maintain, and often too hard to use. Some cloud services offer third-party key encryption, but those offerings are designed for large enterprises and cost more money than these organizations can afford, while often not providing the complete security they need.

As the article notes, some services are taking note and adapting:

"As for the written footprint, Marler, who has attended numerous conferences on how best to serve multilingual learners, has observed a telling shift in the types of in-class translating applications marketed to teachers. These tools were long promoted for their ability to keep records, allowing educators to go back and examine communications over time to learn more about students and families.

Now, Marler said, those same companies are marketing privacy."

But they undeniably need more help.

[Link]