External Mentors, Link Sharing, and a Student IEP Goal
Westbrook District is running a 10-week mentoring program with three external nonprofit partners. Twenty volunteer mentors, none with district accounts, need to join weekly Google Meet office hours and read and write a shared folder of student project drafts. The first week went badly: mentors received You need permission on the folder, so a coordinator set the folder to Anyone with the link can edit; two days later a draft containing a student's IEP goal was visible to a mentor from a different partner. The district allows external sharing but requires that access expire and that the district be able to audit who saw what. The coordinator owns the folder in My Drive and is leaving in June. Meet links were also reused from last year, and a mentor joined a session before the host.
1. Fix the sharing model for the folder. Where should it live, what role, and how does access expire?
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Move the project folder into a district-owned shared drive and grant access at the subfolder level. Mentors from Partner A get Contributor on Partner A - drafts only; Partner B mentors get Contributor on their subfolder; no mentor gets the parent folder. If mentors lack Google accounts, use visitor sharing with a PIN if the admin has enabled it, and set an expiration date on each person's access (Drive > Share > Advanced > Set expiration). If visitor sharing is off, require mentors to create a free account and add them individually with expiration; do not use Anyone with the link. Expiration matters because the program ends in 10 weeks and the coordinator leaves in June. Record the access model in a one-page data-sharing agreement with each nonprofit, including the rule that student IEP or 504 information never enters the shared folder. The coordinator's departure is the argument for the shared drive: files in My Drive would be orphaned or transferred manually. Ask the admin to add you as a shared drive manager so you can audit membership monthly.
2. The IEP document was exposed. What immediate containment and what structural fix do you recommend?
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Contain first, investigate second, redesign third. Immediately turn off link sharing on the folder and the file, then check the file's Activity dashboard or version history to see who opened it; view history depends on settings and admin audit logs. Notify the district privacy officer the same day; do not wait for the weekly meeting, and do not ask the mentor to delete it and forget it. Document the timeline: when link sharing was set, who set it, what the file contained, who accessed it. Structural fix: IEP goals and 504 plans stay in a restricted staff-only folder with access limited to the case manager and administrators; mentors receive de-identified project drafts in a separate folder. If a draft must include accommodation notes, rewrite them as access instructions (extended time on written response) without diagnosis. Add a pre-share checklist to the coordinator's onboarding: no link sharing, check folder location, check subfolder membership. The goal is not to blame the coordinator; the goal is to make the safe path the easy path.
3. How do you stop pre-joining and Meet link reuse for the remaining sessions?
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Stop reusing links. Create a new Calendar event per session with a fresh Meet link, invite the mentors as guests, and keep Quick access off so arrivals wait until the host admits them; if the district allows it, restrict joining to invited guests. Enable host management so the host can mute, remove, and control screen sharing. Because mentors are external, they may appear as anonymous guests; that is a reason to require the Calendar invite, not to rely on anyone with the link. For the pre-join incident, check the event's guest list and the Meet audit log if available; likely the old link was still live in an email thread. Operational fix: post the week's link only in the shared drive's Week N doc and in the Calendar event, never in a running email thread; rotate the link if a session is disrupted. Have a co-host for the first five minutes to manage the waiting room while the lead starts. Rehearse host controls once before Week 1 rather than learning them live.