With school back in session for the fall, parents of K-12 students recently faced a slew of new paperwork from school: authorization forms for this, consent forms for that.

But likely missing from the papers that school administrators sent home are details about what kinds of information the school intends to collect about your child, with whom they will share it, and for what purposes.

Technology can offer exciting new opportunities for learning in and out of the classroom — but we must ensure those new technologies don’t come at the expense of students’ privacy interests. That’s why last year the ACLU of Massachusetts set out to examine the state of student privacy in schools throughout the commonwealth.

In the process, we learned that too many school systems overlook student privacy in a rush to implement new technologies, exposing young people to various kinds of monitoring and tracking without explicit, informed parental consent.

While we know that digitally managed student information systems, usually contracted out to third-party corporations, collect and retain large quantities of information about students, not one school we contacted disclosed a full list of tracked data. And while students are increasingly expected to use the Internet both at school and at home, most policies we obtained state that students do not have a right to privacy on campus networks or take-home laptops provided by schools. School policies should not authorize teachers and administrators to rifle through a student’s Internet history or laptop without notice, consent, or even reasonable suspicion that a young person has violated school policy, but we found that too often in Massachusetts, they do.

But we also learned something equally troubling: because Massachusetts public records law ranks among the weakest in the nation, many schools didn’t even bother to produce information in response to requests about their privacy policies.

We sought information from 35 Massachusetts schools about their policies and procedures relating to the collection, storage, and sharing of sensitive student information. What is truly troubling is that seven districts — a full 20 percent of those surveyed — did not release the requested records.

Three municipalities — Barnstable, Lynnfield and Pittsfield — effectively ignored our records requests altogether. Taking a different tack, the communities of Newton, Lexington and Waltham demanded exorbitant fees ranging from $1,020 to $5,800.

Unfortunately, today in Massachusetts, members of the public — whether they be journalists, public interest organizations, or concerned parents — must rely on the goodwill of government agencies and officials to comply with the public records law. If a government bureaucrat decides compliance with the law is an annoyance, or worries that government transparency might produce thorny political problems best left undisturbed, they can simply ignore the request or demand outrageous fees to make the requester go away.

The only reliable recourse the public has, ultimately, is to sue the agency in violation of the law. And, unlike in 47 other states, if you go to all the trouble to sue to obtain the records, the current public records law does not allow you to recoup your legal fees — even if you win.

That has created a situation in which compliance with the public records law is a crapshoot. Your public records request might be answered; it might not be. And the difference between the two outcomes could be as simple as someone in a government office being in a good mood or a bad one.

That’s not how a functioning democracy works.

Parents across Massachusetts deserve access to information about how the government collects and shares information about their children. No one should be required to take government agencies to court to pry from official hands simple records such as privacy policies or contracts governing corporate use of student data, or — even more basically — what information schools collect about our kids in the first place. School systems, in turn, should not be able to demand outrageous fees for these records, and face no sanction if a court agrees the fees are too high.

Government accountability and democratic oversight require transparency, and we can only have the robust public conversation about student privacy that we need if we understand the lay of the land in Massachusetts schools. For that reason and so many more, it’s past time to upgrade the Massachusetts public records law.

Kade Crockford directs the Technology for Liberty project of the ACLU of?Massachusetts. The ACLU will release a report on student privacy in Massachusetts later in October.