Hi All CPS Staff,
I hope the new school year is going smoothly for you all. Email has been the most widely used form of communication in the district for quite some time now. For the past six months CPS has averaged over 73,000 emails sent/received per day! Many of you will recall the FirstClass system used by the district, some favorably some not, prior to migrating to Gmail. Regardless of the system used, the guidelines around emailing sensitive data have remained the same.
It's best to think of the CPS Gmail as two different systems; Internal email to any @CPSD.US, and External email to any other email address outside of our CPS community.
Internal emails are secure. The emails never leave our CPS managed and secure Google Workspace for Education domain. This means internal emails may contain sensitive, student level data. Please keep in mind though when sending emails with student level data that the recipients must be restricted to those CPS staff that are authorized to access that specific student data.
External emails are NOT secure. Any emails sent to addresses outside of CPS (non @CPSD.US) leave the secure CPS Google Workspace for Education domain and travel across the Internet unprotected. These emails, and the data contained therein, are subject to being intercepted, read or tampered with. Sensitive data should never be emailed outside of the CPS domain.
I hope this is not a surprise for anyone, but rather a reminder of best practices that have been in place for many years. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.
Have a great weekend,
Steve