Privacy Policy

The short version

The full policy is below. If you read nothing else, read this.

• We collect what a school needs to admit a student, teach them, keep them safe, and reach you. Nothing beyond that. When you apply, we ask only what admission needs.
• We do not sell your information, and we never will. That applies to children's information without exception.
• We run no advertising, no behavioral advertising of any kind, and no tracking analytics. We serve our own fonts rather than calling out to another company.
• Parents may see, correct, download, or delete what we hold about their child, and may see who has opened their child's record.
• No AI service ever receives your child's work or information, and no decision about a person is made by a machine.
• Every outside service that can see personal information is named in this policy.

Who we are, and who is responsible

Southern Islamic Institute (SII) is an online Islamic school operated by Ameen Systems. Ameen Systems is responsible for your information: it decides what this site and our school software collect and what becomes of it, and it answers to you for it. Ameen Systems also built and maintains the school's software.

You can reach us about privacy at privacy@southernislamicinstitute.org. We are based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Our mailing address and telephone number will be published here before any child's account is created.

What we collect, and when

We collect information in stages, and we ask for sensitive details only when we truly need them.

When you visit this website

Nothing you have to type. Reading our pages does not require an account, and we run no analytics. See what the site records on its own.

When you join the interest list

Your name, email address, state, and the grades and programs you are interested in. Nothing else about your children. We confirm your address with one email before adding you.

When you write to us

Your name, email address, the topic, and your message. Please do not send health or other sensitive details about a child through the contact form.

When you apply

For your family: your name and email, where you live (state and city, or country if you are abroad), your home language, and, if you choose, your madhhab and a short family statement. For each child: name and the name they go by, date of birth, your relationship to the child, program, grade and preferred start, current schooling, Qur'an level and about how much they have memorized, Arabic level, and one yes-or-no question about a learning plan or health need to discuss. You sign the application by typing your name, and you may ask for occasional news from the school. The application takes no files.

We do not ask for health details, emergency contacts, your address, or school records at this stage.

When your child enrolls

Only after your child's grade is confirmed to open:

• About your child: whether your child is a girl or a boy (Islamic studies and Qur'an are taught in separate groups from grade 5, and every live class from grade 7), and, in the Full-Time Online School from grade 3, whether Arabic is spoken at home (for Arabic groups).
• For an emergency during class: the address where your child attends class (encrypted), with its ZIP code, and your county and its public emergency dispatch number, stored with it; an emergency contact's name, phone number (encrypted), and who they are to your child; one optional safety note (encrypted) and one optional short line teachers may see.
• Guardians: each guardian's relationship to your child (for example mother, grandmother, father, or uncle; it decides who may stand in for a child in a girls' class), phone number (encrypted), and whether our office may text it about urgent matters; legal custody, whether a court order about custody or contact exists, and a copy of any such order; for a second parent or guardian you invite, their name, email, relationship, which home they live in, and any share of tuition they pay; for a learning coach you name, their name and email.
• Prayer location: for prayer times only, a point rounded to one decimal place (about 10 km across), never your home. You set it with your device's location (rounded on the page before it is sent), a city, or a ZIP code, and we look it up in tables inside our own software, so no other company is asked. Until it is set, live classes are kept clear of prayer times across your whole area. Older, more precise points are rounded the same way.
• School matters: any learning support you request, with any plan you choose to upload; school records you choose to share, or your previous school's name and your consent for us to ask it for them; your consents; your payment plan; and the password you set for your child's sign-in.

For a child under 13, we also record how you gave your consent (see children under 13). In the Family Portal you may also tell us your family's Asr timing and which mushaf your child reads from.

While your child learns

Your child's schoolwork, quiz answers and reflections, grades and teacher feedback, attendance in minutes (live classes joined, active lesson time, and offline work you confirm), Qur'an records, recitation recordings if you consent to them, messages on our platform, advisor notes, and report cards.

Staff and job applicants

What you give us when you apply to work here, the results of background checks run with your written permission, training records, and employment records.

What the site records on its own

• Our hosting company keeps standard server logs: the address of the device that asked for a page (its IP address), the browser, the page, and the time. We do not copy these logs or combine them with anything else.
• Our own software does not store IP addresses with people's records. To stop repeated attacks on sign-in and on our forms, we keep a scrambled, one-way code for a network for up to an hour, and then it is discarded.
• When you are signed in, the software records the pages of the school you use (for example, which lessons your child opened and for how long), because that is how attendance and pace work.

We run no advertising and set no advertising cookies. We use no third-party analytics. We host our own typefaces, so reading a page does not announce your visit to a font provider. We use no puzzle tests or third-party anti-bot services on our forms. We do not buy contact lists, and we do not sell, rent, or trade yours.

Children under 13

Our approach follows the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

• We do not ask children to fill in forms on this public website, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child through it. If we learn that we have, we delete it.
• We collect personal information from a child under 13 in our school software only after a parent has given verifiable consent. Our usual method is a live video conversation between the parent and a trained member of our staff at admission. A first card payment or a signed consent form are alternatives. No student account for a child under 13 opens until that consent is recorded.
• Before you consent, we give you a notice that lists what we collect from your child, why, and every outside service that receives it.
• We collect from a child only what school requires: their schoolwork, messages on our platform, attendance, and Qur'an records. Recitation recordings need your separate consent.
• You can consent to what school requires without consenting to anything else, such as recitation recordings or showing your child's schoolwork in school materials.
• Children under 13 get a school username, not an email address. A parent resets their password from the Family Portal.
• You can review your child's information, ask us to delete it, and refuse further collection at any time. If you withdraw your consent, we suspend your child's account the same day, stop collecting, and tell you what we must keep and why.
• We never use a child's information for advertising or marketing, never build a marketing profile of a child, and never sell it. We do not create biometric identifiers, such as face or voice templates, of anyone.

Your child's education records

SII receives no federal education funding, so the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) does not apply to us by law. We follow its core protections anyway, because they are what a family should expect from a school.

• Inspect and review. You may see your child's education records. Most of it is already in your Family Portal; for the rest, ask and we respond within 30 days.
• Correct. You may ask us to correct a record you believe is wrong. If we disagree, we tell you why in writing, and you may give us a written statement of disagreement. Our registrar keeps it with your child's record and sends a copy with that part of the record whenever it is shared.
• Consent before disclosure. We share your child's records outside the school only with your written consent, except: to your child's next school when you ask us to; to comply with a lawful subpoena or court order, after telling you first unless the order forbids it; to a child protection agency when we report a concern; and in a genuine health or safety emergency. Every disclosure is logged. You can see each one in your Family Portal, except a report to a child protection agency, which is kept with our safeguarding records and never shown to families.
• No student directory. SII keeps no directory of students and shares none with anyone. In a live class and in class discussions, other students see a child's first name and last initial. We never give your contact details to other families.
• Notice of these rights. This section is our notice of these rights. Our Terms of Enrollment, which you agree to when your child enrolls, link to it, and it is always on this page.
• At 18. When a student turns 18, these rights belong to the student. Our Records and Transcripts Policy explains how parents' access continues and how we tell the student.

Why we use information

For the ordinary work of running a school:

• answering questions and following up on the interest list and applications;
• admitting and enrolling students, and deciding whether each grade opens;
• teaching, setting work, marking it, and recording progress, attendance, and Qur'an;
• keeping children safe, including in an emergency during a live class;
• reaching parents and guardians, including urgently;
• billing tuition and handling assistance requests;
• recruiting, clearing, and supporting staff;
• keeping the site working and defending it against spam and attack;
• meeting the record-keeping and reporting duties that fall on a school.

Artificial intelligence and automated decisions

We would rather say exactly how AI is and is not used than let you guess.

• No AI on your information. Student records, guardian contact details, schoolwork, recitations, and the contents of messages are never sent to an AI service. Our website and school software make no AI calls, so nothing you type is passed to an AI model.
• No AI teaching or grading. There is no AI tutor, no AI grading, and no AI scoring of recitation. Every AI feature of our video provider (assistants, transcripts, captions, and summaries) must be turned off and locked before any class runs.
• No decision about a person is made by a machine. Admissions, placement, grades, attendance, discipline, and hiring are decided by people. A quiz the computer checks is a practice score marked "not yet reviewed" until a teacher releases it, and each decision records the person who made it.
• One exception we cannot control. Our payment processor runs its own automated fraud checks on card payments; SII makes no automated decisions.
• AI in writing, disclosed. This website and parts of our lessons were drafted with AI-assisted tools and then read, corrected, and approved by a person. Every lesson drafted this way says so and names the role that approved it. Qur'an text and hadith text are never written by AI.
• AI tools and our operations. Ameen Systems 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. AI tools never read school mailboxes, and live checks use a test household that is not a real family. 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.

If any of this changes, this section changes first, before the change takes effect.

Who can see a child's record

A child's record sits behind a sign-in. It is not published, not indexed by search engines, and not visible to other families. Inside the school, access follows a child's real relationships:

• the child's parents and guardians (except anyone a court order restricts);
• the child's current teachers, advisor, and Qur'an teacher, for the classes they teach;
• staff whose work requires it, such as the registrar for records and the billing office for invoices;
• our Safeguarding Lead and deputy, when a child's safety requires it.

Every member of staff must hold a current background clearance to open any child's record, and every view is logged with its purpose. If a cleared staff member without a current role in your child's schooling must open the record, they type a reason, the access lasts 30 minutes for that one child, you see it in your Family Portal, and our directors are emailed a notice with record numbers only.

You can see who has opened your child's record in your Family Portal: one line per staff member per day, with their role and why. There are three exceptions, all to protect children. Access by our safeguarding team for a child's safety, and a counselor's private counseling work, are never shown to families. While a safeguarding concern about your child is open, every other staff access to the record is held back from your list too; our Safeguarding Lead releases it to your list when it is safe to show it. And every opening of your child's Emergency card during a live class is held back from your list from the moment it happens, because the danger may come from home, until our safeguarding team decides it is safe to show it.

Who else can see it

A school cannot run without some outside help. Rather than write "trusted third parties" and leave you guessing, here is the actual list. Each may use the information only to provide its service to us.

Before any other service can see personal information, it is added to this table. We do not use YouTube or any other video site in lessons; lesson videos are our own files or Vimeo players. Our servers send personal information to no one except the services listed here. They make two other outside connections, and neither carries personal information: WordPress.org, for software updates, and IndexNow, a service search engines share, which receives only the addresses of our public pages when they change.

Your own calendar app. If your family turns on the calendar link in the Family Portal, the calendar app you choose (for example Apple Calendar or Google Calendar) fetches, through a private link only your family holds, the school's dates and your children's live class times and course names, and your children's first names only if you tick that box. That app's company works for you, not for the school, so it is not in the table above; it is your family's choice. You can make a new link at any time, and the old one stops working at once, or turn the link off.

Beyond this list, we share personal information only where the law requires it (such as a lawful court order, subpoena, or mandatory report), where it is genuinely necessary to protect someone's safety, or with your consent. Where we are allowed to tell you, we will.

Photos, video, and voices

• Students cannot upload profile photos. Other students see initials.
• From grade 5, no student is required to show their face in a mixed class, and attendance is never measured by camera.
• Recordings of one-to-one sessions are staff-only safeguarding records, deleted 30 days after the session, unless a legal hold keeps them or a safeguarding concern does (one about the child or the session's adults that is open, or that was raised while the recording existed and is still kept).
• Recitation recordings need your separate consent, are heard only by the teacher, our Qur'an lead, and your family, and are deleted 60 days after they are marked.
• We never publish a photo, video, or recording of a child without your separate written consent.
• Families may not record, photograph, or screenshot live classes, because every class shows other people's children.

Our Photo, Voice, and Media Policy has the detail.

How long we keep it

Information should not be kept forever out of habit. These are our periods. When a period ends, the information is deleted, unless a hold described in our Data Retention Policy applies (a safeguarding matter, a legal claim, a court order, or a law, or your own open request to see, correct, or download your information, until it closes); each hold is recorded with its reason and released by our office on its Legal holds screen. Some periods are still being reviewed by our attorney.

Sign-in accounts follow the same rule. A student's sign-in is turned off when the student withdraws and deleted 1 year later; the student record stays, without a sign-in. A family's sign-in accounts are deleted 1 year after the family's last child leaves or its last application closes, unless a legal hold, an unpaid invoice, or an open privacy request still needs them; invoices keep the payer's name as written on them. A former staff member's sign-in is turned off when employment ends and deleted with the staff record.

Deleted information disappears from our encrypted backups as they rotate (we keep the last 30 nightly backups off our server and the last 7 on it, and for 7 days the copy taken before each software update). Deletion is logged by record number, never with the deleted content. Our Data Retention Policy explains how deletion works.

A deleted record leaves every screen at once. In case it was deleted by mistake or wrongly, it is then kept for 90 days in a sealed recovery archive, encrypted and readable by no one. In those 90 days only a Director can put it back (or our safety team, for a safeguarding record), with a written reason, and every restore is recorded and reported to the other Directors or the rest of the safety team. After 90 days the record is erased for good, unless a legal hold covers it. Recordings of children (one-to-one session recordings and recitation recordings) are never kept in the recovery archive: they are erased on their own dates. The periods above do not change.

How we protect it

• The whole site is served over an encrypted connection.
• Sensitive details, such as the address where a child attends class, guardian and emergency-contact phone numbers, and health notes, are encrypted in our database, with the key kept apart from the database. The county and its public emergency dispatch number are stored with the address, not encrypted.
• Staff sign in only through our own sign-in page, with a password and a code from an authenticator app, and every staff session must pass that code step before it can open anything in the school beyond the sign-in pages themselves, where a new staff member first sets up the code app. The standard WordPress sign-in page sends everyone to ours, and our software checks a password only when it comes through our sign-in page. Office sessions sign out after 30 minutes without activity.
• Access follows a person's role and class lists, and every view of a child's record by staff is logged with its purpose.
• In WordPress's own administration screens, nobody, including our technical administrator at Ameen Systems, can change another person's account, its password, or its role, and families' and students' accounts are not listed there at all. Accounts are managed in our school software, where every change is logged. Someone named in a safeguarding concern, administrators included, keeps only their own profile there until the concern closes.
• Private files, such as the documents families send us and children's recitation recordings, are stored outside the public web folder and can be opened only by people allowed to see them. On the live site our software refuses to store a private file anywhere else, and that folder is on the checklist that must be finished before we accept any application. Pictures and videos in our published lessons are curriculum, not anyone's personal information, so they are not held to this rule.
• Before we accept any application, our backups are encrypted and stored off our server, with the key held offline by a person, and we have tested restoring them. The last 7 nightly backups are also kept on our server, encrypted to that same key.
• Before each update to our software we copy the database, so the update can be undone. The copy is readable only by our own hosting account; the unencrypted copy is destroyed as soon as the update is finished (if an update stops partway, a day after the site is back), and a copy encrypted to the same offline key is kept on our server for 7 days, then deleted.
• We have a written plan for a data breach.

No website can honestly promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. Our website runs on a shared hosting account that also holds other websites operated by Ameen Systems. Encryption protects a stolen copy of our database, but it cannot fully protect information against someone who takes over the server itself. That is one reason we collect as little as we can and ask for sensitive details only at enrollment.

If a breach ever affects your information, we will tell the people affected and any authority we are required to notify, and we will say what actually happened rather than issue a vague statement.

Payments

This website does not take payments yet. When payments open, tuition is paid through Stripe on Stripe's own secure pages. No card or bank number is entered on or stored by our site. Stripe receives a student number on each invoice, never a child's name. We accept card and bank transfer only; buy-now-pay-later options are turned off. Nothing renews automatically, and we never store or charge a card without your action.

Cookies

A cookie is a small file a website leaves in your browser. We keep our use of them narrow:

• Sign-in cookies keep you signed in, and are set only when you sign in. If you choose "keep me signed in," they last longer on that device.
• A two-step sign-in cookie lasts five minutes while a staff member enters their code.
• A test cookie. WordPress, the software our site runs on, may set a short test cookie on sign-in pages to check that your browser accepts cookies.

There are no advertising or analytics cookies, because we run neither. Stripe's payment pages and our video classroom set their own cookies on their own pages. Vimeo lesson players are loaded with Vimeo's do-not-track setting on. You can clear or block cookies at any time; that may sign you out, but no public page is withheld from visitors who refuse them.

What you can ask us to do

Whether or not a particular privacy law applies to you, we will honor these requests:

• Show me. Ask for a copy of what we hold about you or your child.
• Correct it. Tell us what is wrong and we will put it right, or tell you why not.
• Delete it. Ask us to remove information. We will, unless a record-keeping or safeguarding duty requires us to keep it, in which case we tell you which duty. What we delete is kept for 90 days in our sealed recovery archive, readable by no one, then erased for good.
• Give me a copy to take away. Download your family's data from the Family Portal. The copy leaves out safeguarding records, an academic counselor's private notes, and other children's posts.
• Tell me who opened it. See it in your Family Portal, with the child-protection exceptions described above.
• Stop emailing me. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and it works at once. Essential messages about an enrolled student are not marketing and continue.
• Explain it. If you only want to understand how something works, just ask. It does not need to be a formal request.

Send any of these to privacy@southernislamicinstitute.org. We reply within 30 days, usually much sooner, and there is no charge. We confirm who you are, and your relationship to the student, before releasing anything, which protects the child as much as it protects you.

Changes, and how to reach us

We revise this policy when our practices change, when we add a service that can see personal information, or when the law requires it. The date at the top always shows the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle student or family information, we will not rely on you noticing a new date: we will tell enrolled families directly before the change takes effect.

School: Southern Islamic Institute, operated by Ameen Systems. Privacy questions: privacy@southernislamicinstitute.org. Response time: within 30 days.