Data & Privacy

S4IS School Tools helps Michigan school teams plan their Innovation & Progress Grant proposals, and hosts the Career-Connected Schools planning space for district teams. This page says what the tools keep, who can see it, and how your school or district team stays in control of it.

1. No student records, ever

• The tools hold group-level (aggregate) data only. There is no place for student names, student ID numbers, birthdates, or anything else that describes an individual student.
• Groups under 10 are suppressed. Any count or rate based on fewer than 10 students is shown as “fewer than 10,” and the number itself is not stored. This applies to the public data we load and to any number your team enters. When you enter a group under 10, the tool tells you it was stored this way.
• Every free-text box reminds you: describe groups and patterns, and don’t enter student names or details that identify a student. If something you type looks like a name or an ID number, the tool asks you to check it. It never blocks you or sends what you typed anywhere else.

2. Information about adults is protected too

To sign you in and show your teammates who is on the team, we keep each person’s name, email address and job title. Only your school’s team and S4IS can see them. Your team’s work, including candid root-cause notes and each person’s ratings, is visible only to your school’s team and to S4IS. A teammate sees how the team’s ratings spread, not who gave which rating, and only the person who gave a rating can change it.

3. What S4IS keeps

• Your account: name, email address and title, and which schools you belong to and in what role.
• Your school’s work: needs assessments, root cause analyses, their save points, and any local aggregate data your team adds.
• Public school data: MI School Data and MI School Index figures for IPG-eligible schools, loaded by S4IS. These are already public; we show each school’s figures only to its own team.
• A sign-in cookie that keeps you signed in on your device for 30 days. We use no advertising or tracking cookies.
• Anonymous usage counts (see section 5).

4. Who can see what

• Your school’s team: your school’s work, data and team list. Leads can also invite and remove teammates and download the school’s data.
• Other schools: nothing of yours. Each school’s work is walled off from every other school’s by the database itself, and we test this on every change.
• S4IS (Stephen Best): everything, to support schools and keep the tools running.
• Anyone, without signing in: only the two sample schools, which are made up.
• Service providers: the tools run on Vercel (website) and Supabase (database and sign-in), and sign-in emails are sent through Resend. They store and process the data only to provide those services.

5. Anonymous usage counts

To see whether the tools are used and which root causes are most common, we count events such as “tool started,” “step completed” and “root-cause code confirmed.” These counts store no school, district or person, and only the date, not the time.

6. Your school’s data is yours

A school lead can download all of the school’s data (JSON or CSV), or ask S4IS to delete it, from “Your school’s data” on the school’s page. We reply by email to confirm before deleting anything. Your work is kept until your school asks us to delete it.

7. Career-Connected Schools district teams

The Career-Connected Schools planning space (plan.careerconnectedschools.org) runs on this same platform under the same rules. A district team’s planning maps hold adult actions, student experiences and decisions, each named to a role, with participation as counts and percentages of all students in a grade band, by group; cells under 10 are hidden and left out of every export. The maps have no place for student records. Partners, sponsors and coaches a district invites hold seats on the team and see the team’s maps, with their names, emails and organizations visible to the team. Each team’s work is walled off from every other team’s, and from every school’s, by the database. A team lead can download the team’s data or ask S4IS to delete it from “Your team’s data” on the team’s page.

Questions

Contact Stephen Best at stephen@systemsforinnovativeschools.com. To look around without an account, try it with a sample school or look at the sample district maps.