While the need for a data retention policy is rapidly becoming clear to schools, little guidance is available for crafting one. Most schools depend on backup and recovery plans that generally focus on individual servers or devices. However, retention policies also need to focus on the type of data contained on those servers and how it will be handled. This distinction means that the IT department or library cannot develop a policy in isolation. The school or school system can take a variety of approaches, from task force to subcommittee, but the solution should include representatives from the library, finance, health, IT, and administration capable of representing the issue to the school board or other governing body. In this article, the author discusses how to create data retention policies and offers some recommendations.