Effective Date: June 17th, 2014

Last updated: April 2020 (Updated product list)

 

For more than 90 years, Scholastic Inc. has been delivering outstanding educational programs directly to schools and libraries, and we cherish our partnership with educators. Serving them and the children they teach is at the heart of everything we do. We are committed to providing quality, engaging educational content to our school district customers. We are similarly committed to ensuring that our customers understand how we use and disclose the information we collect in the course of providing our educational software products (our “Products”) to their administrators, teachers, and students. Our Products include online services and applications. We have prepared this Privacy Policy to describe our practices.

 

As described below, we use the information we collect from school administrators, teachers, parents, guardians, and students in connection with their use of our Products to provide the Products and related services to our school district and library customers and to inform and improve instruction and our Products. We do not use personal information—that is, information that identifies an individual or relates to an identifiable individual—for any other purpose.

 

The Information We Collect

 

In providing our Products, we and our service providers may collect the following:

• Information submitted by a school administrator or teacher about himself or herself, such as first and last name, email address, photo and other profile information, and username and password.
• Information submitted by a school administrator or teacher about the students in a particular school or classroom, such as first and last names, student ID numbers, usernames and passwords, gender and other demographic information, learning level, and performance data. Sometimes our customer provides us with or permits us to access a school or school district database from which we retrieve this information. We may combine information about a student with information about his or her school, such as its location.
• Information about a student’s parent or guardian, such as names and email addresses. This information may be submitted by a teacher or by the parent or guardian, and we may associate it with the student’s information.
• Information and content submitted by a school administrator or teacher, such as lesson plans and notes.
• Information and content submitted by a student using our Products, such as notes and responses to questions, activities, game play, assessments, assignments, and postings to a bulletin board viewable by others in the same class. Depending on the Product, a student’s notes and responses may be provided through open text fields, voice recordings, photographs, or video recordings. If a teacher chooses not to set individual passwords for his or her students’ accounts, then students in the same class may be able to access each other’s notes or other work.
• For certain of our Products, the name and email address of an individual to whom a user wishes to send content from the Product. We use the information only to send the message, and we do not retain it.
• Information about how, where, in a general sense (based on IP address), when, and for how long a user accesses and uses our Products, as well as what content he or she views, what actions he or she takes (including, for example, clicks, touches, and hovers using a mouse), and how he or she navigates through our Products. We may use cookies, pixel tags, and other technologies to collect this information.
• Information from and about the user’s device, such as mobile device type, browser type and version, operating system name and version, IP address, and referring URL. We collect this information automatically when a user accesses our services, to help us understand usage, diagnose problems, administer our Products, and provide support.
• Information collected through cookies, which are pieces of information stored directly on a user’s computer, and other persistent identifiers. We use cookies, IP addresses, and other persistent identifiers to authenticate users in order to ensure that only authorized individuals are permitted access to our Products.
• Information collected through pixel tags (also known as web beacons and clear GIFs) or other, similar technologies to track how a user navigates through our Products, so that we can understand, for example, what links are clicked and what content is accessed and for how long. This information allows us to improve our user interface and create a better product, such as by making commonly accessed content easier to reach or by more prominently displaying content that has been less frequently accessed.
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We do not use cookies, pixel tags, or other technologies to track our users’ use of third-party services.

 

How We Use and Disclose the Information We Collect

 

In addition to the uses described above, and subject to any restrictions imposed by applicable law or our agreement with our customer, we may use and disclose the information we collect:

• To permit our customers and their authorized end users (i.e., administrators and teachers) to tailor and optimize the use of our Products to the needs of a particular school, classroom, or student.
• To permit school administrators and teachers to review students’ work, monitor students’ performance and progress, plan lessons, and otherwise support instruction.
• To permit parents and guardians to review their children’s work and monitor their performance and progress.
• To offer students immediate feedback and continuous support, permit them to access information shared by their teachers, suggest other content or activities for them, help them track their own progress and maintain a file of their work, allow them to create a collection of books or other content, permit them to play games with other students, and adjust instruction to meet their needs.
• To personalize user experience, such as by using the appropriate language, displaying his or her name on the user dashboard or permitting a student to view a profile picture of his or her teacher.
• To permit school administrators and teachers to use our Products’ profile, social networking, and professional development features. These features permit the sharing of the user’s username, photo, and other profile information with other users. They also allow users to
• communicate and share content with one another and, in some cases, with the public. We urge the school administrator and teacher users of our social networking features to be careful when deciding to disclose information through them.
• For analytics purposes, to understand how our Products are accessed and used, and how they perform, so that we may improve upon their design and functionality and otherwise develop and improve upon our products and services. We also develop analytics studies that contain only aggregate information that does not permit the identification of any individual user or of a school or school district. We may disclose these studies to third parties, including to market our products and services to them.
• To provide our school and school district customers, as well as their administrators and teachers with various types of reports, such as reports detailing the performance and progress of a particular school district, school, classroom, or student.
• To communicate with administrators, teachers, and parents or guardians, subject to any communications preferences they express.
• To ensure that our Products run properly and are presented optimally, and for Product improvement.
• To diagnose problems, troubleshoot issues, and provide maintenance and support.
• To calculate the royalties due to the owners of content appearing in our Products.

We may use and disclose nonpersonal information collected from the users of our Products for any reason, subject to any restrictions imposed by applicable law or our agreement with our customer. We do not, however, disclose any personal information about the users of our Products to any third party, except:

• As directed by our school district customer to which the information relates.
• To our third party service providers, who provide services such as website hosting and customer service, to permit them to provide those services to us.
• To the extent we believe necessary or appropriate to comply with legal process or to respond to requests from government authorities.
• To the extent we believe necessary or appropriate to protect our rights, safety, or property and/or that of our affiliates, our customers, our users or others.
• In the event of any reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets or stock (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings), in which case the transferred information will remain subject to the terms of this Privacy Policy.

 

Third Party Services

 

This Privacy Policy does not address, and we are not responsible for, the privacy, information, or other practices of any third parties, including any third party operating any site or service to which our Products may link. The inclusion of a link in any of our Products does not imply our endorsement of the linked site or service. In addition, we are not responsible for the privacy, information or other practices of other organizations, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, or any other device manufacturer, app developer, or provider of an app, social media platform, operating system, or wireless service.

 

Security

 

We seek to use reasonable organizational, technical, and administrative measures to protect personal information within our organization from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, loss, or modification.

 

User Access

 

The law may permit students and their parents or guardians to access certain of their own information. If you would like to seek such access, please contact your school district.

 

Retention Period

 

We will retain personal information collected in connection with the Products for the period necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy and in our agreement with our school district customer.

 

Updates to This Privacy Policy

 

We may change this Privacy Policy. The “Last Updated” legend at the top of this page indicates when this Privacy Policy was last revised. Any changes will become effective when we post the revised Privacy Policy or provide it to our school district customer, which accepts the Privacy Policy on behalf of our Products’ end users. Any changes will become effective when we post the revised Privacy Policy or, in the case of any material change, provide the revised Privacy Policy to our school district customer, which agrees to the Privacy Policy, and any revisions to it, on behalf of its administrator, teacher, parent or guardian, and student end users.

 

Contact Us

 

Inquiries regarding data collection or privacy practices for such products or sites should be directed to the appropriate Scholastic entity using the contact information provided below, or may be emailed to: edtechprivacy@scholastic.com