Starting at the opening of the 2025-2026 school year, Westford Public School (WPS) students can no longer access a host of websites including YouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Earth and Google Translate using school chromebooks. This change comes after a Google services policy update that restricted additional services to all school districts that comply with student data privacy laws and use Google Workspace for Education.

WPS received notice of the update at the end of the 2024-2025 school year, while other districts were informed as early as the fall of 2024. The delayed information left WPS with less time to prepare new policies for the platforms, including gathering parental consent, which is required for students to independently access these services if they are under 18. The district has not identified a reason for the delay in notification.

“According to the law, applications and services have to meet requirements to protect student data privacy. In fact, companies have to sign a Data Privacy Agreement (DPA) that goes on file for a certain amount of time. When the agreement expires, it must be renewed in order for schools to use the application or service,” WPS Instructional Technology Supervisor Lisa Sanderson said. “At the present time, Google’s core services, [including Docs, Drive, Sheets and Slides], are able to meet the student data privacy standards; however, the additional services do not.”

If a vendor refuses to sign a DPA, such as the additional services, parental permission is required for any app or extension that collects students Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and is not on the district’s approved list of websites. This ensures that student data privacy is maintained while allowing some controlled educational use.

“There are workarounds for teachers if they’re using YouTube and those types of things,” Twomey said.

While there are workarounds for teachers, there aren’t any for students.

“A teacher may post YouTube videos to Google Classroom or embed the videos in a Google Slides [presentation] to distribute to students for viewing. The students do not access the YouTube server directly, so no student data is collected,” Sanderson said. 

These additional services were previously available to students at all times with unrestricted use. Now, Google transferred the responsibility of determining which additional services should stay activated to the schools. Because each school’s use of Google Workspace for Education is different, making one unanimous decision for districts worldwide can have conflicts with certain national or state laws.

“I see the usefulness of [the additional services], but there’s still some more conversations that need to take place,” Twomey said. “At the end of the day, we do have the data that [shows us what] our students are using the network for. So we still need to sift through all that [data].”

For now, these additional services are blocked to students until the administrators within WPS decide what the next best step is. This step, according to Twomey, could be as simple as a parental sign off, or it can involve the Westford School Committee and Superintendent Dr. Chew to help navigate WPS through these technological adversities.

“I think there’s a use for [these additional services] for nine through twelve students on their own, like if they’re trying to figure out things on their own [and] using [these services] as a resource,” Twomey said. “[But] there’s definitely some more work that needs to be done.”

Sanderson’s role as Instructional Technology Supervisor is a new position in the district that works at the administrative level.

“Right now, we are gathering information and looking at best practices in meeting our curriculum needs,” Sanderson said. “We also are staying in line with many other school districts.”