Privacy

Mastery Board holds education records on behalf of the schools and districts that use it. The records belong to the school, not to us.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) lets a school share those records with an outside party it designates a school official with a legitimate educational interest (34 CFR 99.31(a)(1)(i)(B)). That designation is the district’s to make, not ours. The exception sets four conditions, and this is what each one means here:

• We do work the school would otherwise do itself. Recording how each child is doing on the skills they are taught, and reporting it, is the school’s own work. Mastery Board is where its teachers do it.
• The school keeps control of the records and how they are used and kept. Its administrators invite the staff who work there and set the role each one has. They can take someone off a team, which ends their access to that team’s classes at once, or off the school, which ends all of it; and a district administrator who asks us to delete a school can close it to its staff at once, while the request waits. Within a school, a teacher can add a colleague from that same school to their team, which opens that team’s classes to the colleague; a school administrator can see the school’s teams and undo it. What gets recorded is the teachers’ — the skills they assess, the marks and the notes — because that is their work. We decide none of it, and we follow the school’s instructions about its records, including an instruction to delete them.
• We use the records only to provide the service, and we do not pass them on. That is the condition FERPA sets on any outside party a school shares its records with, 34 CFR 99.33(a), and it binds us.
• The school’s own annual FERPA notice has to count contractors as school officials. A district’s annual notice to parents says who counts as a school official and what counts as a legitimate educational interest (34 CFR 99.7(a)(3)(iii)). For this exception to cover us — or any other vendor — that notice has to include contractors performing school functions. That part is the district’s to check on its side.

Children do not sign in to Mastery Board, and they give it nothing themselves. There is no account for a child to have: accounts are for teachers, school administrators and district administrators, and for Mastery Board’s own administrators, and a child’s record is a row in the school’s records, with no email address, no password and no link to the sign-in service. Their teachers enter what is recorded, as part of teaching them.

Districts ask what the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) means for an app that holds records about five- and six-year-olds. COPPA’s rule is about personal information collected online from a child (16 CFR 312.2), and Mastery Board collects nothing from a child, because no child ever uses it. There is no page, form or box anywhere in it that a child fills in, and no child has an account: the database refuses to make an account for an email address without an invitation waiting for it, and every invitation is to join as a teacher or an administrator, so there is no kind of account for a child and no way for a child to make one. Everything Mastery Board holds about a child was entered by their teacher or a school administrator, from the school’s own records and from watching the child learn, as part of the school’s education records. We never contact children or their families.

If anything is ever added to Mastery Board that a child would use, we will tell schools before it is, and it will follow COPPA.

What COPPA requires of a district, and what the district’s own policy requires, is for the district and its counsel to settle rather than take our word for. If a district’s review needs this answered on its own form, write to info@abovesoulutions.com and we will complete it.

Teachers and school administrators enter:

• Name, and a Student ID if the school uses them.
• The school and classes a child belongs to, and when they joined or left a class. Only a district administrator, or one of Mastery Board’s own administrators, can move a child to another school in the district; the results recorded at the old school stay with its classes.
• Assessment results: the score on each objective or question, which letters or words were missed, whether the child was absent or exempt, and which staff member recorded each mark and when.
• Teachers’ notes on a child’s assessment, written by the teacher.
• Small groups a teacher places a child in.

Mastery Board does not ask for dates of birth, addresses, parent or guardian contact details, photographs of children, health or disability information, or grades from other systems. Notes are free text, so we ask teachers to keep them to what a child is learning.

A change log records the changes people make — to marks, notes, children, classes, templates, who has access to a district, school or team, whether someone is one of Mastery Board’s own administrators, accounts deleted, a district’s sign-in rules, and resets of two-step sign-in — with who made each one, when, and what it changed from and to. Because it records what changed, it holds copies of what was changed: a child’s name, a mark, the words of a note as they were before and after. A child’s record deleted for good takes their entries with it.

• Name and email address, and the schools, teams and roles someone has.
• A profile photo or icon, if they choose one.
• Invitations, including the name and email address the administrator entered and who sent them, and requests to join a team, including any message written with a request. A district administrator’s request to have a school deleted keeps who asked, when, and any reason they gave.
• Preferences, such as favorite pages and which school and school year are showing.
• Sign-in details: a password, stored only as a secure one-way hash; the key that lets the person’s authenticator app make sign-in codes; and when someone last signed in. Someone who signs in with their district’s Microsoft account is known to us by that account’s email address and the identifiers Microsoft gives the account and its organization. We ask Microsoft for nothing else: no access to their email, files or calendar.
• The days someone uses Mastery Board: one entry a day, saying who and which day and nothing about what they opened. It lets their school’s and district’s administrators see when they were last here and on how many days they have used it. Other teachers can’t see it.
• Files uploaded to a board template, such as a printed assessment, and who uploaded them.

Changes staff make are recorded in the change log, described above.

Like every website, our hosting and sign-in providers keep standard technical logs, such as the IP address and time of a request, to keep the service secure and working.

The form on our front page asks for your name, your school email address, your role, the grade you teach, your school, district and state, and anything else you choose to tell us. It reaches us as an email, sent through Resend, and is not kept in Mastery Board.

We use it only to answer you and to set up your trial. The form asks nothing about children, so please leave out anything about a child. If you would like us to delete your request, write to info@abovesoulutions.com.

Only to provide Mastery Board to the school:

• to record, report and print children’s progress for their teachers and school;
• to send account emails: invitations, links confirming a new account’s email address, requests to join a team and the answers to them, and password resets;
• to answer a request for a trial, and set the trial up;
• to keep the service secure and working, and to fix problems;
• to answer questions and requests from the school.

We never sell or rent information, never show advertising, never use tracking or analytics scripts, never build profiles of children for any purpose other than their teaching, and never contact children or their families.

Mastery Board has no artificial intelligence in it. We do not use children’s records, teachers’ notes or anything else a school puts into it to train or improve an AI model, ours or anyone else’s, and nothing a teacher types is sent to an AI service.

Tennessee’s law on student data asks an online service used for school purposes a short list of questions, and here are our answers in one place. We do not advertise in Mastery Board, targeted or otherwise. We do not use what we hold to build a profile of a child for anything but their teaching. We do not sell or rent a child’s information, and we do not pass it on. We keep the security described on the Security page. And we delete a school’s information when the school asks — see below. How the law applies to a service like ours is for the district and its counsel to say; what we do is the same either way.

• Teachers see the classes on their own teams, the children in those classes, and any children they entered themselves while they are still at that school. Taking a teacher off a team ends their access to that team’s classes and their marks at once; taking them off the school ends all of it, including the children they entered.
• Staff at a school can see the names, email addresses and photos of the other staff there.
• School administrators see their school, and district administrators see their district, including its change log. Teachers don’t see the change log.
• Mastery Board’s own administrators can see and change the records of every district and school. We use that access only to set up districts and schools, support the people using them, and keep the service running.
• Our service providers, listed below, process data only to run the service for us.

These rules are enforced by the database itself on every request, not only by the screens a person is shown. See Security for how.

Apart from the service providers below, which only run the service for us, we do not give a school’s records to anyone else. Under FERPA’s rule on redisclosure, above, we pass them on only when the school tells us to. If someone demands a school’s records with a subpoena or a court order, we tell the school first and point the request back at the school, so the school can decide and can tell the parent — unless a court forbids us to say so.

These companies handle data so the service can run, under terms that let them use it only to provide their service to us.

Each of these companies uses providers of its own to run its service — Supabase runs on Amazon Web Services, as the table says — and each is bound by its agreement with us to hold its own providers to terms like the ones it gives us. Each publishes its current list: Supabase, Vercel and Resend. If we add or change a company that handles a school’s records, we will email school and district administrators before it starts.

Microsoft is not one of them. When someone signs in with their district’s Microsoft account, Microsoft is the district’s own sign-in, under the district’s own agreement with it: it tells us who is signing in, and we send it nothing from the school’s records.

Mastery Board only uses cookies it needs to work: cookies that keep someone signed in, and sign a browser out once it has sat unused for longer than the district allows; one that notes the day a person was last counted, so each day they use Mastery Board is written down once; and a few that remember choices on the screen, such as a collapsed sidebar, the school, team and school year showing, or a password reset in progress. The browser also remembers how Board Templates is laid out: where its preview sits and how wide its panels are. There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

Ask, and it is deleted within 7 days. A school or district administrator can write to info@abovesoulutions.com and ask us to permanently delete any or all of that school’s information — one child’s record, one class, or everything: its teams, classes, templates, children’s records, results, uploaded files, change log and staff accounts. We delete it within 7 days of the written request and confirm when it is done.

One thing can hold part of it up: records that belong to somewhere else. If a class at another school — or, when a district is being deleted, at another district — still has marks on a template made here, uses an objective one of these teams named, or sits in one of these school years or terms, those records are that other place’s and we have to settle them with it first. If that happens, we will tell you what is holding it up, and when it is finished.

While a school uses Mastery Board, nothing is deleted on a schedule. A child’s record follows them from one school year to the next, and at least three school years of it stay in place, so a teacher can see how a child has grown and a district can meet its own records-retention schedule.

When an agreement ends, we delete everything belonging to that school or district within 30 days, unless it asks us in writing to keep it — while it moves to a new agreement, say, or takes a copy for its own records.

FERPA does not set how long education records are kept: state law and the district’s own records schedule do, and the district stays their custodian. One thing we ask before we delete: tell us if a parent’s request to see a child’s records is still open, since records under an open request are not to be destroyed (34 CFR 99.10(e)).

The rest of what a school can do for itself, at any time:

• A teacher can take a child off a class. The child’s past results stay with the school, so a year’s record isn’t lost when a child moves class.
• A school administrator can permanently delete a child’s record, for example one entered twice. A teacher can delete a class, and the results recorded in it are deleted with it. Both are asked to confirm first.
• When someone leaves, a school or district administrator can take them off the school, which ends their access to everything there at once, or off one team, which ends their access to its classes and their results. Mastery Board deletes their account when the school asks. The classes they made stay with the school. So do their templates, which pass to the administrator who took them off the school, or to Mastery Board’s if their account is deleted, and which the school’s and district’s administrators can still open, change and delete.
• Deleting a staff account deletes its profile, photo and preferences. Marks they recorded, and their entries in the change log, stay with the school without their name. Their name and email address stay on past invitations, and on any template handed over to someone else.
• A child’s record deleted for good takes their entries in the change log with it, leaving only a note that a child’s record was deleted, by whom and when.

Deleting takes information out of the live database at once. A copy can remain in our database provider’s encrypted backups until those age out on their own, within 30 days, and we do not restore a backup to bring deleted records back. Nobody at a school or district can reach a backup. A backup is restored as a whole database, and we would only restore one to bring the service back from a failure.

Parents, and students old enough to hold the right themselves, can inspect and review a child’s education records, and can ask that a record they believe is inaccurate be corrected. Those rights run against the school, because the records are the school’s, not ours.

• Requests go to the school. If a parent or student writes to us directly, we will not answer for the school. We pass the request to the school and tell the person we have done so.
• We help the school answer. FERPA gives the school 45 days to answer a request to see a child’s records (34 CFR 99.10(b)). A teacher can print a child’s results for a class, for a conference or for a file, or save the class’s board as an Excel workbook. Where a school needs more than the app shows, it can write to info@abovesoulutions.com and we will help it put the answer together.
• The school makes corrections itself. A teacher can change a mark or a note; anyone who can see a child can correct their name or Student ID; a school administrator can delete a record entered twice. The change log records who changed what and when, and school and district administrators can read it. None of it has to come through us.

Information is encrypted when it travels and where it is stored, every request is checked against who may see what, and an automated suite of access-rule tests runs on every change pushed to the code. The Security page has the detail.

If we learn that information has been accessed without permission, we will tell every affected school and district within 3 business days of confirming it, by email to their administrators. We will say what happened, which information was involved, what we have done about it and what we advise the school to do, and we will keep telling them as we learn more — the first message will not wait for the full picture. Where the law sets a shorter deadline or asks for more, we meet that as well.

If we change how we collect or use information, we will update this page and its effective date. For a change that matters to schools, we will email school and district administrators before it takes effect.

Questions, requests and concerns about privacy go to info@abovesoulutions.com. Above Soulutions, LLC.