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Current and former students in some school districts are eligible for a portion of a $17.25 million class action settlement reached in February with several ed tech companies and the Chicago Board of Education.
The settlement involved Naviance — a college, career and life-readiness platform developed by Hobsons and later acquired by PowerSchool — which has been used by many districts nationwide, including Chicago Public Schools.
The original plaintiff in the class action lawsuit, a Chicago Public Schools student known as Q.J., first alleged in 2023 that the two ed tech companies had “aided and conspired with Heap and other third parties to unlawfully intercept without consent the confidential and sensitive communications” of students using Naviance. Heap is an insight and analytics platform geared toward ed tech providers.
Some of the intercepted information included sensitive, confidential and statutorily protected education and student records, according to the plaintiff. The companies and CPS denied any wrongdoing in the settlement.
PowerSchool has identified over 10 million individuals who could be eligible for settlement funds, the agreement said. Current and former students who logged into Naviance at least once between Aug. 18, 2021, and Jan. 23, 2026, qualify for financial relief if the settlement is approved in a final hearing on Aug. 19, according to the settlement notice.
As these notices go out, districts should be ready to answer questions from their communities about their schools’ use of Naviance and other ed tech tools that could be inappropriately sharing data with advertisers or those unauthorized to view it, said Doug Levin, co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange, or K12 SIX. The nonprofit aims to protect schools nationwide from cyberthreats.
In a statement emailed to K-12 Dive on Tuesday, a PowerSchool spokesperson said the ed tech company “strictly and proactively” follows student data privacy requirements at the federal and state levels. Despite denying wrongdoing, the company entered into the settlement agreement with the codefendants “to avoid the uncertainty, distraction, and expense” of ongoing litigation.
“Importantly, the schools and districts who are PowerSchool customers own their data,” the PowerSchool spokesperson said. “We do not sell student data, we do not collect, maintain, use, or share student personal information beyond what is authorized by the district, parent, or student.”
Accountability in the age of ed tech pushback
The Naviance case is also significant, Levin said, because it’s part of an emerging, broader trend of ed tech companies being held accountable for the first time in the courts and through federal regulations for allegedly not keeping their promises to protect children’s privacy and security online.
In another related example, he cited the Federal Trade Commission’s December announcement that it had reached a settlement with Illuminate Education after the ed tech company’s 2021 data breach exposed the personal data of over 10 million students.
All of this is happening as schools are increasingly facing pushback on screentime and the use of ed tech in classrooms, Levin said. Parents, teachers and sometimes even students are “seeing the downsides to the amount and type of technology usage that is related to school,” he said.
This growing momentum against ed tech in schools could be a correction to classrooms’ “extreme” overreliance on technology that sped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools had to switch to virtual instruction for an extended period, Levin said.
“I definitely have seen schools start to even walk back 1:1 initiatives because of cost,” Levin said. “Maybe our youngest students don’t need devices. Or maybe we’re not going to rely on all of these different online content providers.”
Another pending case against PowerSchool
Meanwhile, a multidistrict class action lawsuit against PowerSchool is moving forward in federal district court. That case involves an alleged December 2024 data breach at the ed tech giant that allegedly led to the exposure of sensitive personal data for 50 million teachers and students, according to court documents.
PowerSchool is continuing to invest in advanced security technologies and work with districts, privacy experts and regulators to ensure it is meeting the highest standards of student data privacy, the company’s spokesperson said in response to the ongoing class action lawsuit over the 2024 data breach.
While settlements and charges have been growing against companies over alleged failures to protect student data privacy, Levin said there have been fewer successful cases involving K-12 cybersecurity. Levin said he’ll be watching to see if the PowerSchool case advances as the student data privacy cases have been.
“I think we’re much further ahead as a nation in thinking about what’s important in protecting student information than we are in what we need to do to secure it,” Levin said.
