Student data & FERPA
A school is accountable for its students’ education records. Volanee is built so a school can answer the questions that accountability asks: who can see a record, who has seen it, what is kept, and what happens when you leave.
1. Our role
When a district adopts Volanee, we act as a school official with a legitimate educational interest under FERPA’s school official exception, performing a service the school would otherwise do itself — tracking and verifying service hours. We will sign a student data privacy agreement saying so, including the terms below. We use student data only to provide the service to the school. We do not use it to build profiles, train models, target advertising, or for any secondary purpose.
2. Who can see a student record
| Who | What they can see |
|---|---|
| The student | Everything in their own record. |
| Their guardian | Their teen’s record, applications and hours. The guardian approves the account and each paid job. |
| A verified counselor | Only students confirmed at that counselor’s own school. There is no district-wide browsing, and no access to a student at another school. |
| An organization | Only what a student sent them: an application, or an hours request they were asked to confirm. |
| Volanee staff | Only what is needed to review an identity document or answer a support ticket, and every such action is logged. |
3. Who looked, and when
Every time a school opens a student’s record, Volanee writes an audit entry naming the staff member, the student and the time. The same is true of each approval decision, each hours review and each identity decision. A school can therefore answer a parent asking who has accessed their child’s record.
4. Data minimisation
A school is shown that an hour was confirmed, by whom, and how strongly that confirmation can be relied on. It is not shown the supervisor’s personal email address or phone number. Compliance documents a student uploads (immunisation records, TB tests) are visible only to the student and to a clinic they have chosen to send a request to — never to the school by default.
5. How it is stored
Dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, verification results and compliance documents are encrypted before they leave the application (AES-256-GCM); the storage backend only ever holds ciphertext. Identifiers in links are opaque tokens that cannot be guessed or counted through. All traffic is HTTPS. Passwords are hashed with scrypt.
6. Where it lives, and who else touches it
| Provider | Purpose | Region |
|---|---|---|
| Render | Application hosting | United States |
| Supabase | Database and encrypted document storage | United States |
| Email provider (if configured) | Sending hour-confirmation requests | United States / EU |
We will tell a district before adding a sub-processor that touches student data.
7. Keeping and deleting
A student’s hours record belongs to them and follows them after they leave the school; a school’s access to it ends when their membership does. On written request from the district, we will delete or return the district’s student data within 30 days, and confirm it in writing. A student may delete their own account at any time. Identity documents are destroyed as soon as a verification decision is made — only the outcome is kept.
8. Parent rights
A guardian can see their teen’s record in the app at any time. Requests to inspect, correct or delete education records held on the school’s behalf go through the school, and we will support the school in answering them promptly.
9. If something goes wrong
If student data is exposed, we will notify the district without undue delay and no later than 72 hours after we become aware, with what happened, what was affected, and what we are doing about it.
10. What we will not claim
Volanee verifies identity and searches the public sex-offender registry; that is not a full criminal background check and we never describe it as one. Volanee does not certify organizations it has not verified — which is why the school approves what its own students may take on. See the safety page for the full position.
11. Contact
Questions from a district, or a copy of our data privacy agreement: reach us through support and mark it district data.