PassRule Privacy Notice

What PassRule Keeps

• About students: name, grade, the six-digit student ID number, school email address, class schedule, school photo, and the school's records of the student's tardies, hall passes and incidents, and of the messages sent about them. From the school's student information system it also keeps the student's counselor and case manager, the dates they enrolled and left, whether they are on the school's 504/IEP list, and whether they are in a group the school reports on (students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, English learners). It keeps the school's hall-pass arrangements for a student, such as extra passes. Staff may add a note to an incident, which only administrators see; a teacher may add a short description when sending a student to dress code, which only administrators, the dress-code team, the front office and the student's assistant principal see.
• About parents and guardians: name, relationship to the student, the email address and mobile number the school has on file, and the family's home language. If they sign up for texts: when they signed up, and the version of the words they agreed to. A text they send to PassRule's number is kept.
• About staff: name, school email address, role, and, only if they choose to get texts, their own mobile number. Only if they turn on phone pop-ups: the pop-up address of each phone they turned them on for. PassRule also records who recorded or changed what, and when.
• About anyone else: nothing about visitors to PassRule's public pages. To slow down password guessing, PassRule counts failed sign-ins by network address, kept only in a scrambled form and only for a day. If someone texts PassRule's number from a number the school doesn't have on file, the number and the text are kept so the school can see them.

Why

Only to run the school's attendance and conduct procedures: recording tardies, passes and incidents, applying the school's discipline steps, sending the notices about them, and the school's own reports. PassRule shows no advertising. It never sells information, and it never uses it to build marketing profiles.

Who Sees It

• School staff, each only what their role needs. For example, a teacher sees the check-ins to their own classes, and administrators see their school's records.
• At the classroom pass station, or from their own Chromebook if the school switches it on, a student starts a pass right away where the school allows it (a restroom, unless the school changes it) and asks for a pass to other places. A student ends only a pass they could start; staff end the others. The request (the student's name, grade, room and period) goes only to the people who answer for that place, by email and in PassRule (and by text or phone pop-up, if they turned those on), and is kept like a hall pass. A student may add a short message to a request; only those people and the school's administrators read it, and it is in the email to them. The station and the Chromebook show the names of the administrators a student may ask for, so the student can choose one.
• Every staff member sees the hall passes that are out in the building: the student's name, grade and photo, where they went from and to, and the time. A teacher may look up any student by name or student ID number only to start a pass, and sees just the name, grade and photo.
• A teacher or an administrator may send a student to the administrators for a major classroom disruption, with a short description of what happened. Every assistant principal is told, by email and in PassRule (and by text or phone pop-up, if they turned those on, without the description). Only the school's administrators read the description. Nothing about it is sent to the family or the student.
• The school's dress-code team sees only the students sent to it: name, grade, photo, the teacher and room, and the teacher's description. The team is emailed when a student is sent, and again if the student hasn't arrived after a set number of minutes. These emails go only to the team.
• Front-office staff do the dress-code team's work too, and get its emails. They also see students' hall passes and start them, see which students reached a discipline step (view only — the assistant principals decide what follows), and record dress-code incidents. They may look up any student and see the student's tardies, incidents, hall passes and discipline steps, never the administrators' notes. They also check a student in on a phone when a kiosk is down, and print a student's report for a call with the family.
• A staff member the school gives it to (special education, for example) may look up a student only to print that report, never the administrators' notes; each one printed is recorded.
• A family receives messages about its own student only, and a student about themselves.
• A student may sign in to PassRule, with a link emailed to their school address or through the district's sign-in, and sees only their own record.
• During AO Time, PassRule keeps where each student is placed, who placed them and each teacher's request, and emails a student their place the afternoon before when it isn't their usual room. If the school switches it on, a student may also pick an open session in PassRule, and PassRule keeps the pick. The teacher takes a roll (here or not here), which counts toward nothing. Teachers and administrators see these, and a family's copy of the record includes them; nothing about AO Time is sent to a family.
• Student records in PassRule are education records, protected under FERPA and district policy. Nothing is shared with another school.

Companies That Help Run PassRule

• Render, which hosts PassRule and its database, in the United States.
• Postmark, which delivers its emails.
• Telnyx, which delivers its texts.
• Apple, Google or Mozilla, whose push services deliver a staff member's phone pop-ups, encrypted so that they can't read them.
• Cloudflare, which runs the passrule.com web address and forwards a reply sent to the school's PassRule email address to the school.
• Sentry, which receives a report when part of PassRule breaks: an error code and where it happened, never a name, a number or the words of a message.
• UptimeRobot, which checks every minute that PassRule is answering; it sees only the word "ok".

Each receives only what it needs to provide that service. PassRule uses no analytics, advertising or tracking service.

Text Messages

• Mobile numbers and texting consent are never sold, rented or shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.
• The information about who signed up for texts, and when, is not shared with anyone except the company that delivers the texts.
• Texts go only to people who signed up for them. Notices are sent only between 7 AM and 9 PM; the one confirmation when you sign up, and the reply to STOP, HELP or START, come right away.
• Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply.
• Reply STOP (or ALTO) to stop, START to start again, or HELP (or AYUDA) for help.
• A text a family sends to PassRule's number, such as a reply to a text from the school, is kept with that family's messages, read by school staff, and kept and deleted on the same schedule as the messages.
• A text from a number PassRule doesn't recognize is kept for 90 days, then deleted.

The full texting terms are in the texting terms.

How Long It Is Kept

• Each record of a tardy, hall pass, incident or message is kept until the end of the school year after the one it happened in (a school year ends June 30). Then a school administrator deletes it.
• A student's own details are kept while they are enrolled, and deleted at the end of the school year after the one they leave in. A student's photo is deleted 30 days after the student leaves the school.
• A former staff member's name and contact details are deleted at the end of the school year after their account is switched off.
• A record that is the subject of a records request, a complaint or a legal matter is kept until that is resolved.
• Deleted records stay in PassRule's backups for up to 7 days.

Keeping It Safe

• PassRule is reached only over an encrypted connection.
• Staff and students must sign in, and each person sees only what their role allows.
• PassRule uses only the cookies it needs to work: to keep staff and students signed in, to recognize a browser that has signed in before, to register a school kiosk, and to hold a staff member's search for a few minutes. It uses no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies, and its public pages set none.

Questions, or to Review or Correct a Record

Contact Warner Robins High School's front office. Parents and eligible students may review education records, ask for a copy, and ask to correct them, as FERPA and district policy provide.