Privacy policy

Effective September 7, 2026 · Last updated September 7, 2026

What SchoolBoardHQ collects, how it is used, who it is shared with, and your choices.

Privacy at a glance

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You provide account, profile, and (optionally) document information; some directory information comes from public state/district sources.

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You can sign in with email and password, or with Google, LinkedIn, or Sign in with Apple — see Signing in below.

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Your board role and district are visible by default to other verified members in your own district; anything wider (the cross-district People directory, Community) is either opt-in or clearly scoped to other verified members, never the open internet.

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Several features send limited data to Anthropic to generate text on your behalf; PostHog receives your account ID for feature targeting plus lightweight, non-content usage events; Sentry receives crash reports with personal fields and record ids removed, so they cannot be traced back to you; Resend sends our verification codes and digests; Expo delivers push notifications to your device if you allow them; Supabase is our backend and stores your account data.

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You can delete your account at any time from Settings, with no need to contact support.

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You may also have rights to access, correct, export, or restrict use of your data, depending on where you live — see Your privacy rights below.

This page answers what we collect about you and why. How long we keep it, and how you get a copy of it, is answered by our Data Policy: a shorter, separate page for exactly those two questions.

This page is the plain-language summary; the sections below have the full detail. Ordinary SchoolBoardHQ membership is limited to currently serving elected or appointed K-12 school board members who complete identity verification against a public board-member directory. SchoolBoardHQ is a product of Spade House Studio, a trade name of E. A. Williams, LLC. Questions go to support@schoolboardhq.com.

Information you provide

When you sign up we store your email address and your password (see Service providers below for how your password is protected). Since SchoolBoardHQ is currently invite-only, sign-up also asks for an admin-issued invitation code; we record which code you redeemed and when. During onboarding you search a public board-member directory to verify your seat, and you self-report your date of birth — used only for basic age assurance, see Children's privacy below, and never independently verified.

If we can't confirm a directory match automatically, a staff member reviews your request manually using the same directory data plus whatever you submitted.

You can optionally add a phone number, city/state/ZIP, links to your social or professional profiles (like LinkedIn), and governance experience areas or interest tags to your profile. These also power search and filtering in the People directory, subject to the same visibility rules described in What other members can see below.

Signing in

You can create an account with an email address and password, or sign in using Google, LinkedIn, or Sign in with Apple. When you use one of those options, the provider shares your name and email address with us to create your account — we never see or store your password for that provider.

Sign in with Apple works a little differently, by Apple's own design. Apple shares your name only the very first time you authorize the app — we can't request it again on a later sign-in — and lets you choose to share your real email address or a private, Apple-generated relay address ("Hide My Email"). If you use a relay address, anything we email you still reaches your real inbox through Apple's relay; we never see the address behind it.

If you turn on optional two-factor authentication (Settings → Account & security), the authentication secret used to generate your codes is created and stored by our authentication provider, Supabase Auth — not in our own database — and used only to verify your sign-in attempts.

Information obtained from public sources

Board-member roster entries (name, district, role, public contact fields) originate from public state and district sources and exist in our directory independently of your app account — they're already public before you ever create an account. Verifying your seat links your account to your existing roster entry; it does not make new information public that wasn't already.

Information generated through use of SchoolBoardHQ

Using the app generates records tied to your account: your verification status and history, connection requests you send or receive, items you save, checklist steps you complete, posts and comments you write, notifications, and any feedback, roster corrections, feature requests, or ratings and reviews you submit.

How information is used

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To verify your board seat and, where needed, to have a staff member manually review a claim.

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To show you other members in your district and, if you opt in, the cross-district People directory.

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To operate features you use directly — Forums, Board Document Library, Plan, Newsfeed, notifications.

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To respond to feedback, roster corrections, and feature requests you submit.

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To automatically screen new posts, comments, messages, and profile text for content that violates our Community Guidelines before other members see it, and to flag likely violations for our moderation team.

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To generate lightweight, non-content usage analytics that help us see which features people actually use.

What other members can see

Your board role and district are visible to other verified members in your own district by default — that's the core of how SchoolBoardHQ connects board members. Listing your profile in the broader cross-district People directory is a separate, opt-in setting (off by default, toggled in Settings); turning it on shares your name, role, and district with other verified members browsing that directory, and lets them send you a one-way connection request.

Everything in this section is scoped to other verified members inside the app — not the open internet. The only exceptions are the roster data described in Information obtained from public sources, which is already public, and this app's own public legal pages.

Community content

Posts and comments you write in Community display your name to every other verified member who can see that channel — community content is not private within the app, though it is still limited to verified members, not the open internet. Don't post anything there you wouldn't want attributed to you publicly among other members.

Documents and uploaded content

Board documents (budgets, policies, minutes, improvement plans, contracts) uploaded to the Board Document Library are stored in Supabase Storage and are visible to other verified members in the same district. Calendar-import files (district/board/legislature calendar PDFs or Word documents) you upload or paste in are processed to extract event dates and are not shared outside your district's board.

AI-assisted features

Several features send data to Anthropic’s Claude models to generate text on your behalf. They fall into four groups:

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Writing on your behalf: the AI Profile Builder, which sends the answers you type in to draft a bio paragraph you choose whether to save; AI-assisted review drafting, which sends short answers about your experience with SchoolBoardHQ to draft your public testimonial text and, separately, private notes for our team — you review and edit both before anything is submitted (see Reviews and testimonials below for where each part goes); and meeting and annual-calendar briefs, which send the meeting or district information the brief covers.

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Finding your board’s public information: searches that send what you provide — a district name, a document title, a pasted URL, or an uploaded file — to locate your board’s published calendar, agendas, minutes, documents, officers, roster, or finance pages on the open web. These return candidates for you to review; nothing is saved to your workspace until you confirm one.

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Summarizing and organizing material you already have: document summaries and text extraction, extracting decisions from minutes, sorting a saved item or a discussion post by topic, and explaining a news article.

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Answering your questions: the in-app AI chat, which sends your question and the context you select.

This list describes the kinds of AI-assisted features in SchoolBoardHQ rather than naming every one, because we add and change them. Wherever one is used it is labelled in the app, and anything it finds shows you its source before you decide whether to keep it.

Anthropic processes this content to generate a response and, per its API terms, does not use API inputs to train its models. We only send what a given feature needs — for example, the Profile Builder sends your typed answers, not your full account record.

Reviews and testimonials

When you submit a star rating and review through Rate & Review, our team reviews it before it is shown to anyone else. If approved and selected as a featured testimonial, your review text is shown to other verified members in the app alongside your name, board role, and district — the same visibility described in What other members can see above.

If you write private notes as part of a review — for example, using the AI-assisted review composer's "What could be better?" prompt — that text is sent to our team through the admin portal and is never published or shown to other members, unless you explicitly choose to include it in your public review text before submitting.

Purchases

SchoolBoardHQ's features are free for every verified member. There is nothing to buy in the app, and we do not collect payment information, so no payment processor receives anything about you.

Service providers

We work with a small number of service providers to operate the app. Each only receives the data described below, for the purpose described.

Service providers we use and what they receive

Supabase

Purpose

Backend database, authentication (including optional sign-in with Google, LinkedIn, or Apple, and optional two-factor authentication), and file storage

Data shared

Account and directory data, uploaded documents, and — if you choose to use them — the identity your sign-in provider shares and your two-factor authentication secret

Retention

For as long as your account is active

Anthropic

Purpose

AI-assisted features: drafting text on your behalf, summarizing and organizing material you already have, finding your board's published information, and answering your questions

Data shared

Only the specific input a feature needs — see AI-assisted features below

Retention

Governed by Anthropic's API terms; not used to train its models

PostHog

Purpose

Usage analytics and feature-flag targeting, tied to your account ID

Data shared

Your account ID, feature-flag evaluation requests, and feature-usage events — not their content

Retention

Per PostHog's standard analytics retention

Sentry

Purpose

Crash and performance diagnostics, so we can find and fix errors in the app

Data shared

Error and performance reports from the app. Names, email addresses, message and post text, document contents and similar personal fields are removed on your device before a report is sent — and so are the internal ids of the records involved, so a report cannot be traced back to your account

Retention

Per Sentry's standard error-reporting retention

Resend

Purpose

Sending transactional email — verification codes and notification digests

Data shared

The email address a message is sent to, and the contents of that message

Retention

Per Resend's standard email-delivery retention

Expo

Purpose

Delivering push notifications to your device, if you allow them

Data shared

Your device's notification token, and the notification itself — which includes the name of the member who prompted it and, for a reply to something you posted, the text of that reply. A new-message notification deliberately carries only the sender’s name, never the message

Retention

For as long as the notification is in transit; tokens are removed when you sign out

Your password is never stored in plain text or in a reversible ("encrypted") form. Our authentication provider, Supabase Auth, stores a bcrypt hash of your password — a one-way transformation that cannot be decrypted back into your original password, even by us.

Organizational sponsorship

Not yet available

This section describes something we may build in the future. It is not a feature SchoolBoardHQ offers today, and describing it here does not mean it currently exists.

We may in the future offer a way for a district, association, or other organization to sponsor member access to SchoolBoardHQ. If we build this, SchoolBoardHQ remains independently operated, and a sponsor would not receive your private member communications or your individual activity inside the app.

Notifications and analytics

Peer-activity and connection-request notifications are generated by our backend when someone interacts with your account (for example, a connection request). We do not use a third-party push-notification analytics vendor, and we do not track whether you opened one.

If you allow notifications, we ask your device for a notification token and store it so we can reach that device. Delivering the notification sends it, and that token, through Expo’s push service and on to Apple. A notification includes the name of the member who prompted it, and when someone replies to something you posted it includes the text of their reply, so you can read it from your lock screen. A new-message notification is deliberately different: it carries the sender’s name only, never the message itself, because a lock-screen preview is visible to anyone near your device.

You can turn notifications off for any category in Settings, or withdraw permission entirely in your device settings. Signing out removes that device’s token.

When you sign in, we identify your account — by your account ID, not your name or email — to our analytics and feature-management provider, PostHog, so we can gradually roll out features to specific accounts and see which features people actually use.

What we send PostHog is the name of a screen you opened or an action you took — for example that you published a discussion, sent a message, or used an AI-assisted feature — never its content. A screen name is recorded each time you move between screens. No message, post, document, bio, AI prompt, display name, email address, or date of birth is ever included: the app enforces that in code, by allowing only a short fixed list of technical values to accompany an event.

Two of these events happen before you have an account: opening a referral invitation link records that the link was opened and which channel it came from, so we can tell working invitations from broken ones. That is recorded against an anonymous identifier, not against you, because at that point we do not know who you are.

We also use Sentry to collect crash and performance reports when something goes wrong in the app. Names, email addresses, message and post text and document contents are removed on your device before a report is sent, and so are the internal ids of the records involved — so a crash report tells us what broke and where in the app, but cannot be traced back to your account.

None of this data is linked with data from other apps or websites, sold, or used for advertising.

Data retention and account deletion

We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. Content you posted that other members rely on for context (for example, a forum reply) is retained in de-identified form rather than fully removed. Public directory data (board member roster entries) originates from public state/district sources and persists independently of your app account.

Delete your account

You can schedule deletion of your account yourself, in-app, from your Profile tab → gear icon → Settings → Delete account — no need to contact support. After confirming with your password, your account enters a 30-day grace period; permanent deletion happens automatically at the end of it unless you sign back in and cancel before then. Signing out of every device only happens if you choose to sign out.

Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access a copy of the personal data we hold about you, correct inaccurate data, request deletion, receive your data in a portable format (JSON or CSV), ask us to restrict certain processing, object to processing based on legitimate interests, or withdraw consent you previously gave.

How to exercise your rights

Email support@schoolboardhq.com with your name, account email, and the right you'd like to exercise. We verify your identity within 3 business days and aim to complete most requests within 30 calendar days (up to 60 additional days for complex requests — we'll tell you if that's needed). Account deletion itself is fastest done in-app — see Data retention and account deletion above — this process covers everything else, like a standalone data export or correction request.

Breach notification

If a data breach affects your personal information, we'll notify you within 72 hours of confirming it, explain what happened and what data was involved, describe what we're doing about it, and report to relevant authorities where the law requires it.

California and other state privacy rights

If you live in California, you may have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), including the right to know, delete, and opt out of the sale of personal information — we don't sell personal information. Residents of other states with comprehensive privacy laws (Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and others) may have similar rights. Use the process above to exercise any of them.

Children's privacy

SchoolBoardHQ is built for elected or appointed K-12 school board members and is not directed at children. During sign-up we ask for a self-reported date of birth as a basic, unverified age-assurance step. If you tell us you are under 13, we stop immediately: we do not save your date of birth, we sign you out, and we do not create a working board-member profile for you. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Changes and contact

If we make a material change to how we handle your data, we’ll update the date at the top of this page and, where required, notify you in the app before the change takes effect. Questions go to support@schoolboardhq.com.