Privacy Notice – Southern Islamic Institute

Who are we?

Southern Islamic Institute is an Islamic K to 12 private school. The school decides what information this website collects and what becomes of it, which in legal terms makes the school the controller of your data.

The website was built and is maintained for the school by Ameen Systems, a web studio working to the school’s instructions. What they can reach, and why, is set out in section 05. They do not use anything from this site for their own purposes.

This notice covers southernislamicinstitute.org and the student portal at student.southernislamicinstitute.org. Both are run by the school.

What do we collect?

Things you tell us

Most of what we hold came from you directly, through one of the forms on this site or by email. Depending on which, that can include:

your name, email address, phone number and postal address
the name and age of the child you are enquiring about, and your relationship to them
what you tell us in an application or an enrolment enquiry
details you give when offering to volunteer, to join the team, or to support the school
what you write when you request information or ask to join a support group
employment details, if you apply to work here or are a member of staff

Things the site records on its own

your IP address, and the approximate region it suggests
your browser and device type
which pages you opened, and when
failed sign in attempts, kept so we can shut out repeated attacks
whether one of the school’s own short links was followed

Things we deliberately do not do

We run no advertising on this site and set no advertising cookies.
We use no third party analytics. There is no Google Analytics here, and no equivalent.
We self host our typefaces, so simply reading a page does not announce your visit to a font provider.
We do not buy contact lists, and we do not sell, rent or trade yours.

Student records and your child’s information

Most privacy notices avoid this subject. We are putting it third.

Southern Islamic Institute teaches children, so the school necessarily holds records about people too young to consent for themselves. You are owed a straight account of what those records are.

How the information reaches us

Information about a child comes to us from a parent or guardian, or from the school’s own staff in the course of teaching. We do not ask children to complete forms on the public website, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child through it.

What a student record can contain

the student’s name, age and year group
the parent or guardian’s name and contact details
enrolment and admissions information
coursework, assignment submissions and quiz answers, where a course is taken online
grades, progress and any certificate awarded
notes kept by staff in the ordinary running of the school

How it is treated

Student information sits behind a login and is reachable only by staff whose work requires it. It is not published, not indexed by search engines, and not visible to other families. It is used to run the school and for nothing else. It is never used for advertising, and it is never sold.

What a parent or guardian may ask for

to see what the school holds about your child
to have anything inaccurate corrected
to be told who has had access to it
to have it deleted, where no legal duty requires the school to keep it

Write to privacy@southernislamicinstitute.org. We will confirm who you are and your relationship to the student before releasing anything, which protects the child as much as it protects you.

Why do we collect it?

For the ordinary work of running a school, which is to say:

answering an enquiry and following up on an application
admitting and enrolling a student, and administering that enrolment
teaching, setting work, marking it, and recording progress
reaching a parent or guardian, including urgently
sending school news and notices to people who asked for them
recruiting, employing and supporting staff
acknowledging and administering donations and offers of support
keeping the site working and defending it against spam and attack
meeting the record keeping duties that fall on a school

Who else can see it?

A school website cannot be run without some outside help. Rather than write “trusted third parties” and leave you guessing, here is the actual list. Each one is permitted to use the information only to provide its service to the school.

Provider	What it does	What it can see
Namecheap	Hosts the website and carries the school’s own mail	Everything stored on the site
Brevo	Delivers the email this website sends, such as a reply to an enquiry	Recipient address, subject, and the content of that message
hCaptcha	Tells people apart from bots at sign in and on forms. Run by Intuition Machines, Inc.	Your IP address, browser characteristics, and how you interact with the challenge
Fluent Forms	Runs the enquiry, application, donation and staff forms	What you type into a form, stored on our own server
Ultimate Member	Runs accounts and profiles	Account name, email address, and any profile fields completed
LearnPress	The online course platform	Coursework, assignment submissions, quiz answers, grades and certificates
WP ERP	Holds staff and human resources records	Employment information entered by the school
BetterLinks	Shortens the school’s own links and counts how often they are followed	That a link was followed, and the address it was followed from
Loginizer	Blocks repeated failed sign in attempts	IP addresses attempting to sign in
Ameen Systems	Built the site and maintains it, over a cryptographically signed connection	The same records a school administrator can reach, used only for maintenance the school has asked for

If we add a service that can see personal information, it goes in this table.

Beyond that list

The school shares personal information in only two further situations:

Where the law requires it, such as a lawfully issued court order, subpoena or mandatory report. Where we are allowed to tell you this has happened, we will.
Where someone is at risk, and disclosure is genuinely necessary to protect the safety of a student, a member of staff or another person.

Do we use artificial intelligence?

Yes, in one narrow way, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

This website was built using AI assisted software tools. Some of the writing on the site, including parts of this page, was drafted with AI assistance and then read, corrected and approved by a person before it was published.
No decision about a person is made by a machine. Admissions, enrolment, placement, assessment, discipline and hiring are decided by people at this school. There is no automated decision making about students, families or staff.
Your information is not sent to an AI service. Student records, guardian contact details, coursework and the contents of your messages are not fed into any external AI system.
The website itself makes no AI calls. Nothing you type here is passed to an AI model.

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

Cookies, captchas and tracking

A cookie is a small file a website leaves in your browser. This site keeps its use of them unusually narrow.

Sign in cookies. If you have an account, cookies keep you signed in and remember display choices. They are set only once you sign in.
Form cookies. Short lived, so a part completed form is not lost.
hCaptcha. The anti bot check on our sign in and forms sets its own cookies and sees your IP address. It is there to stop automated attacks on accounts, including student accounts.
Link counting. Following one of the school’s own short links records that the link was used.

There are no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies on this site, because we run neither. You can clear or block cookies through your browser at any time. Doing so may sign you out, but no part of the public site is withheld from visitors who refuse them.

Donations and payments

The school publishes forms for donations, sponsorship and support of its work.

This website does not currently take card payments online. The donation and sponsorship forms record your name, contact details and what you would like to give, and the school follows up with you directly. No card number is entered on this site and none is stored here.

There is no subscription, no recurring charge and nothing that renews automatically. If the school ever enables online payment or recurring giving, this section will name the payment processor and describe the renewal terms, including the notice you would receive before any repeat charge, before that feature goes live.

How long do we keep it?

Information should not be kept forever out of habit. These are the periods the school works to.

What	Held for
Enquiry and application forms	While the enquiry is live, and up to three years after, then deleted
Student records	Throughout enrolment, then for as long as South Carolina and federal school record keeping rules require
Coursework, grades and certificates	Kept as part of the student record, on the same basis
Staff and employment records	For the period employment law requires
Donation and sponsorship records	As long as needed to acknowledge the gift and meet accounting duties
Accounts and profiles	Until the account is closed, then removed
Mailing list membership	Until you unsubscribe
Failed sign in records	A short security window, then discarded
Backups and server logs	Rotated, with older copies removed as new ones are made

How is it protected?

The whole site is served over an encrypted connection, so what you send travels protected.
Student records and staff records sit behind a login, reachable only by accounts the school has authorised.
Repeated failed sign in attempts are detected and blocked, and an anti bot check guards the sign in and registration pages.
Uploaded files are protected against direct access, so a private document cannot be reached by guessing its address.
Backups are held on the school’s own hosting account and are not uploaded to any outside storage service.
Remote maintenance runs over cryptographically signed requests rather than a shared password.

No website can honestly promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we will commit to is this: 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.

What can you ask us to do?

Whether or not a particular privacy law applies to you, the school will honour 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.
Delete it. Ask us to remove information. We will, unless a record keeping duty requires us to keep it, in which case we will tell you which duty.
Stop emailing me. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link and it works immediately. Essential communication about an enrolled student is not marketing and will continue.
Explain it. If you only want to understand how something works, just ask. You do not have to make it a formal request.

Send any of these to privacy@southernislamicinstitute.org. We aim to reply within thirty days and usually much sooner. There is no charge.

Changes, and how to reach us

We revise this notice 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 reflects the current version.

If a change materially affects how the school handles student or family information, we will not rely on you noticing a different date. We will tell enrolled families directly.

School: Southern Islamic Institute
Privacy enquiries: privacy@southernislamicinstitute.org
Response time: Within 30 days