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Ross-lem
Ross Lemke

Ross Lemke is the Director of the Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) and has an extensive knowledge of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the intersection and overlap between IDEA and FERPA. Ross has provided on-site and remote privacy-related technical assistance to almost every state in the country, and to multiple levels of stakeholders, from SEAs to school community members. 

Mr. Lemke has twenty years’ experience in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors in technical assistance, data management, data collection, and privacy and security for the public and private sector, including over twelve years in education. Previously, he worked on the IDEA Data Center (IDC), where he provided technical assistance on the IDEA Confidentiality Rule and authored a Part B and a Part C confidentiality checklist and presented at multiple conferences on the intersections between FERPA and IDEA. He has worked with the state of Maine around requirements gathering and user acceptance testing for a new Part C and Part B 619 tracking system, and with special education offices in Idaho, South Dakota, Georgia and Nebraska on data governance activities involving the mapping of business processes around their special education systems and how the data in those systems rolled up to the Department of Education.

Mr. Lemke has managed two of EDs largest K-12 data collections centers (EDFacts and CRDC), helping states and districts provide federally mandated data to the U.S. Department of Education including data in support of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and data used in support the Office for Civil Rights’ mission to enforce federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, and age. He has extensive experience in evaluating education data systems, developing business intelligence analysis and reports for elementary and secondary education data systems. He also has provided technical support for data collection in areas such as Part B, Part B 619, Part C, Title 1, Assessment, Discipline, McKinney Vento, English Language Learners (ELL), data integration, data security, and student privacy.