Communications and AI Use

Three kinds of message

Our platform has three kinds of message, and no others:

• Private conversations: staff, one student, and that student's parents. Parents and teachers talk here about one child. A learning coach you name is not part of them: a coach sees coursework, the schedule, attendance, class discussion, and class announcements as a parent does, and may report an absence, and nothing more.
• Class discussions: the teacher and the students of a class. Each parent can read their own child's posts and the teacher's posts, but not other children's.
• Announcements: one-way messages from the school or a teacher to the families of a class.

There are no private messages between students. The one exception to the rule that parents are included is a child's private "Talk to someone" conversation with our safeguarding team, described in our Safeguarding and Code of Conduct.

Our reply promise

• Staff reply to messages within one school day.
• Teachers return feedback on submitted work within 3 school days.
• Privacy requests are answered within 30 days.
• Our office tracks conversations waiting for a reply, so none is forgotten.

Notices and email summaries

• You choose a daily or weekly email summary of your children's week (weekly by default).
• If your child misses a live class, you are told the same day, whatever your summary setting.
• Urgent matters come by email at once, and by phone once our phone line is open.
• Invoices, reminders, and receipts come by email with a link to the Family Portal.

Email from SII

• School email comes from addresses at southernislamicinstitute.org, sent through the school's own mail server.
• Our mailboxes (admissions, office, privacy, and safeguarding) are read only by people, never by any automated or AI tool.
• Emails to our staff about a child carry no details about the child; they say "sign in to view."
• The interest list hears from us only when applications open or when there is real news. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link that works at once.
• We never send marketing email to students.

No contact outside the platform

SII staff will never contact your child outside the SII platform: no texts, calls, social media, gaming chats, or personal email. If anyone claiming to be from SII does, tell us at safeguarding@southernislamicinstitute.org.

Where AI never goes

• No AI service ever receives a child's work, messages, recitations, records, or personal information, or a family's.
• There is no AI tutor, no AI grading, and no AI scoring of recitation.
• No decision about a person (admission, placement, grades, attendance, discipline, or hiring) is made by a machine. Our payment processor runs its own automated fraud checks on card payments; SII makes no automated decisions.
• Every AI feature of our video provider (assistants, transcripts, captions, and summaries) must be turned off and locked before any class runs.
• Qur'an text, hadith text, and our new Qur'an and Arabic lessons are never written by AI.

Where AI is used, and how it is disclosed

Some lesson text is drafted with AI help, behind the scenes. Every such lesson is checked line by line by a qualified reviewer and approved before any student sees it, and it says so publicly, for example: "Drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by our Islamic studies reviewer," with the date. Parts of this website were also drafted with AI assistance and approved by a person.

Your child is taught and assessed by people. Some lesson text is drafted with AI help; every such lesson says so and names who approved it. No AI ever sees your child's work or information.

AI in how the school is run

Ameen Systems, which operates SII, builds and maintains our software with the help of AI coding tools. Those tools never see family data:

• By our operating rule, maintenance on the live site uses only our own maintenance commands, which show record numbers and counts, never names or content.
• Live checks use a synthetic test household, never a real family.
• AI tools never read school mailboxes.
• The website's own system mail goes only to the school office mailbox, which only people read, never to an Ameen Systems mailbox. WordPress's own notices to the site administrator about changed passwords and new accounts are turned off.
• Our software logs each maintenance command it runs on the live site as "Ameen Systems maintenance," by the command's name only. Commands run outside our software, such as direct database commands, are covered by our rule, not by that log.
• Ameen Systems' other AI tools are never connected to SII.

If any of this changes, this policy and our Privacy Policy change first, before the change takes effect.