Educational agencies and institutions increasingly collect and maintain large amounts of data about students in order to provide educational services. Some data, like students' transcript information, may need to be preserved indefinitely. Other student information will need to be preserved for a prescribed period of time to comply with legal or policy requirements governing record retention, then will need to be destroyed once those time periods have elapsed. But a large amount of student information--some of which may still be highly sensitive--may become unnecessary or irrelevant the moment a student graduates or otherwise leaves the school, and can be destroyed immediately. Similarly, third parties providing services to a school or district, or conducting research or evaluations for a state or local educational agency, are often authorized to receive and use student data, but are typically required (either by law or by contract provisions) to destroy the student data when it is no longer needed for the specified purpose. In most of these cases, merely deleting a digital record or file will be insufficient to destroy the information contained therein--as the underlying digital data are typically preserved in the system, and can often be "undeleted." Specific technical methods used to dispose of the data greatly impact the likelihood that any information might be recovered. This document provides an overview of various methods for disposing of electronic data, and discusses how these methods relate to legal requirements and established best practices for protecting student information. A list of additional resources and a glossary are included.