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SchoolBoardHQ
Privacy policy
Effective September 30, 2026 · Last updated October 20, 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 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; Voyage AI turns the text of board documents saved to Workspace into search vectors so Ask HQ can find the right passage; PostHog receives your account ID for feature targeting plus lightweight, non-content usage events; Sentry receives crash reports from the app and error reports from our servers, with personal fields and record ids removed, so they cannot be traced back to you; Resend sends our verification codes, notification digests, and account or opted-in founder/product emails; Expo delivers push notifications to your device if you allow them; Supabase is our backend and stores your account data.
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Nearby & events is opt-in: joining an event room or starting Nearby is something you do yourself, Nearby uses Bluetooth only while its screen is open, and we never store how close anyone was or who was near you.
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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 people age 18 or older who are currently serving elected or appointed K-12 school board members and 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. Document-intelligence allowances are also explained there; they govern retained and processed copies, not reading the public original.
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). If you arrive with a referral, district, or admin-issued code, we may record the code you redeemed and when so we can preserve referral or organization context. A code is not required to create an account. 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.
To find your district, you can let the app read your approximate location once. Those coordinates are sent to our backend for that one request, used only to rank the school district offices nearest you, and are never stored. Declining is fine: the same step offers a search of the district list by name, and the app never reads your location at any other time.
If you use Nearby & events, joining a professional-development event’s room records that you joined, when, and whether other members in that room may see you. Starting Nearby asks for Bluetooth permission the first time, and only then. While the Nearby screen is open, your phone broadcasts a random code that is new each time you start it and expires after 15 minutes; your name, profile and location are never broadcast. When another member’s phone hears that code, their app asks our backend who it belongs to, and it is matched only for a verified member who also started Nearby and is listed in People. We do not store how close anyone was or a history of who was near you. If you send or accept a connection request from Nearby or an event room, we note that it came from Nearby or that event.
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), governance experience areas, interest tags, and specific board experiences. Capturing a specific experience does not publish it. You separately choose whether SchoolBoardHQ may use it for your private personalization, show it on your profile, include it in People expertise search, or mark you as open to peer questions about it. Use for my personalization starts on for each entry; you can turn it off for any entry under Settings → Privacy & security → Experience & expertise.
Signing in
You can create an account with an email address and password, or sign in using Google 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.
Specific Experience & expertise entries are private to other members by default. For each entry, you can separately choose profile display, People expertise-search visibility, and whether to show an Ask me about signal. A global audience control can limit shared experience to verified members, accepted connections only, or nobody. Search-only sharing exposes the situation/topic needed for discovery, not the private story, role, or year you entered.
If you join an event room and choose to appear, other verified members who joined the same room and chose to appear can see that you are taking part, and you can see them. If you start Nearby, a verified member listed in People who has also started Nearby close by can see you while both sessions last. Members you have blocked, or who have blocked you, are always left out. Leaving the room or stopping Nearby removes you.
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.
Your superintendent evaluation
If you use the Superintendent evaluation workspace, the goals, evidence, check-ins, notes, your own input and the summative copy you write there are private to your account. No other member can see them in the app, including other board members in your district, and neither can the superintendent. We copy the superintendent’s name and title from your district’s public leadership record into your evaluation when you start it. The workspace never rates the superintendent for you, and it shares sources and questions for your board’s counsel; it does not give legal advice. These records are included when you download your data and are deleted when your account is deleted. Whether records you keep about a public employee are public records is a question for your district and its counsel, not something we can decide.
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 (Ask HQ), which sends your question, the context you select, and — so it can pitch its answer to you — your setup answers about how long you have served, the issues you are working on, what you want SchoolBoardHQ to help with, and only the specific Experience & expertise entries for which you left Use for my personalization turned on (it starts on for each entry). Turning that control off excludes that entry from Ask HQ personalization without changing whether you share it with other members. Each Ask HQ conversation also keeps a private work-session record — the opening words of your first question as its title, the kind of board work it appears to be, your district and when you last used it — so Ask HQ can pick up where you left off; with a new question, Ask HQ may receive that record and the titles of up to two of your other conversations that match the question. When a question touches a situation other members have chosen to make searchable, Ask HQ receives only counts of how many members have worked through it and how many are open to questions about it, never a name, a role or anyone’s story. If you keep a private Superintendent evaluation, switch on Ask HQ for it and open Ask HQ from the evaluation, Ask HQ also receives the titles and dates of the goals, evidence, check-ins, requirements and follow-ups you recorded there, the name you gave your evaluation approach, the source label you typed on each piece of evidence, the source named on each requirement that comes from a state reference, your goals’ success measures, any contract dates you entered (the kind of date and the date only), counts from your other evaluations that have Ask HQ turned on (each one’s school year, status, step, approach and counts of goals, evidence and findings, and nothing you wrote in it), and where you are in the process; if you only mention the evaluation in a question, it receives counts, dates and where you are in the process, which can include your contract dates and those counts from your other evaluations. A private note is included only if you mark that note for Ask HQ. Ask HQ never receives the superintendent’s name or title, a rating you recorded, your written input or summary, a link, a contract term, label or note, a source you typed on a requirement of your own, or a note you did not include, and you can switch it off for that evaluation at any time. Your Ask HQ conversations, including the titles of the evaluation records Ask HQ cited in its answers, are kept with your account until you delete them or your account. You can delete any one conversation in Ask HQ, or all of them under Settings → Privacy & security → Clear Ask HQ history. So we can see which subjects members ask about, each Ask HQ question also adds one to a daily count for its general topic (for example, budget and finance, or open meetings) and whether you are on Free or Pro. The topic is worked out on our servers by matching words in the question against a fixed list; it is not sent to Anthropic or anyone else, and the count keeps no question, answer, name, account or conversation.
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.
Board documents saved to Workspace are also prepared for search. Their extracted text is split into short passages and sent to Voyage AI, which returns search vectors that we store with the document; when an Ask HQ question searches those documents, the wording of the question is sent to Voyage AI the same way. Voyage AI receives no name or account details with either.
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 core features are free for every verified member, including reading every public policy, agenda, minutes, news item and governance record the app gathers. SchoolBoardHQ Pro is an optional paid subscription that raises AI capacity and retained document-intelligence allowances; it never puts the public original behind a price.
If you subscribe in the iOS app, the purchase is processed entirely by the Apple App Store under its own payment and refund terms. If you subscribe on the web, the purchase is processed by Stripe through our purchase-processing provider's checkout, and the card details you enter go directly to Stripe. Either way we never see or store your payment card details. Our purchase-processing provider, RevenueCat, receives a record of the subscription and an identifier tied to your account — and, for a web purchase, the email address you give at checkout — so we know which subscription is yours. See Service providers below.
The AI-assisted features do have per-member daily limits, so we keep a count of how many times you use each one. For most features that record holds only which feature ran and when — not what you typed. AI chat is counted from your saved conversation itself, described under AI-assisted features above. The limits themselves are explained in the Terms of Use. Those terms also explain the retained document-intelligence allowances; those limits govern SchoolBoardHQ storage and processing, not reading the public original.
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 or Apple, an optional LinkedIn connection for importing your name, 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
Voyage AI
Purpose
Turning the text of board documents saved to your Workspace, and the Ask HQ questions that search them, into search vectors so Ask HQ can find the relevant passage
Data shared
The extracted text of a document you or a member of your board saved to Workspace, in short passages, and the wording of an Ask HQ question that searches those documents — never your name or account details
Retention
Governed by Voyage AI's API terms; the search vectors are stored with the document in Supabase
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. Error reports from our servers carry only the failing feature, the error type and a short developer-written description, with ids and email addresses removed; never what you wrote, uploaded or asked
Retention
Per Sentry's standard error-reporting retention
Resend
Purpose
Sending account and notification email — verification codes, digests, and opted-in founder/product updates
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
RevenueCat
Purpose
Processing the optional SchoolBoardHQ Pro subscription, and its web checkout
Data shared
A record of your subscription and an identifier tied to your account, plus, for a web purchase, your account email (or one you enter at checkout) for the receipt — never your payment card details
Retention
Per RevenueCat's standard retention
Apple App Store
Purpose
Billing and payment processing for a SchoolBoardHQ Pro subscription bought in the iOS app
Data shared
Handled entirely by Apple — we never receive or store your payment card details
Retention
Governed by Apple's own retention policies
Stripe
Purpose
Payment processing for a SchoolBoardHQ Pro subscription bought on the web
Data shared
The card details and billing information you enter at checkout, which go directly to Stripe — we never receive or store your payment card details
Retention
Governed by Stripe's own retention policies
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 Me → gear icon → Settings → Delete account — no need to contact support. After you confirm, 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 age 18 or older and does not offer accounts to minors. Before the create-account path on web and native, we ask for a self-reported date of birth as a basic, unverified age-assurance step. If you tell us you are under 18, we stop account creation, do not save your date of birth, and do not create a working board-member profile for you. If an existing or cross-device session reaches the fallback age screen and reports an age under 18, we sign that session out without saving the date of birth.
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.