Privacy policy

From the parent who holds the account:

• Your email address, which is how you sign in. There is no password.
• Your name, if you give it, and the name, email, and phone of your kid's education specialist (ES), if you add them.
• What you tell us in the app: attendance, PE minutes, answers to the questions each week, the grades you confirm or change, and settings such as who is home and what the school day looks like.

About your kid:

• First name, grade, which books they are using and where they are in them, and the placement results you enter.
• Photos of their schoolwork, uploaded each week.
• What Pencilbox writes from those photos: per-page grades, notes on what was missed, and a short running description of how your kid is doing in each subject, which we call the learner profile. You can read every version of it in the app.
• The printable packs, keys, and learning period packets we make for you.

Automatically: the date and time of sign-ins and uploads, the moment you agreed to these terms, and the standard server logs any website keeps for a short time. We use no analytics service and no advertising trackers. The only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in.

Kids do not have accounts. The only screen a kid uses is a private upload link that you create in your settings and hand to them. That page shows your kid's first name and the week's page list, and collects nothing but the photos they choose to upload and the moment they tap “I'm done”. It asks for no name, no email, no location, and it sets no cookies of its own. Anyone holding the link can see that page, so treat it like a house key; you can replace it any time from your settings.

You are the parent or legal guardian of the child whose work is uploaded, and by creating the link and giving it to your child you consent to our collecting those photos on your behalf. If you did not consent to a child's work being uploaded, email hello@pencilbox.io and we will delete it.

• Read and grade the photos, write the next week's pack and the grown-up's key, and close each learning period with the labels, PE log, and packet your charter asks for.
• Email you: a sign-in code, a welcome note the first time you sign in, a Sunday reminder, a note when a week or packet is ready, and a note when a learning period is about to close with something still owed. Nothing else. No marketing email.
• Fix problems. When a build fails, the person who runs Pencilbox can look at the family's data to see why.

We do not sell your information, share it with advertisers, or use it to build profiles for anyone other than your own kid's learner profile inside your own account.

Pencilbox runs on other companies' computers, the way nearly every website does. Each one is bound by a contract that limits it to doing its job for us:

• Supabase stores the database and the photos and PDFs.
• Anthropic provides the language model that reads and grades the photos and writes the plans. Photos and the text around them are sent to it for that purpose. Its commercial terms do not permit it to train its models on what we send.
• Vercel serves the website. Render runs the background worker that builds packs and packets.
• Resend delivers our email.

Nothing goes to your charter or your ES from us. The learning period packet goes to your ES only when you upload it to their folder yourself, and the email to the ES is one you send from your own account.

We will share information if the law requires it, for example a valid court order, and we will tell you unless we are legally barred from doing so.

As long as your account is open, so that last year's samples and profile are there when you need them. When you close the account we delete the family's data, photos and PDFs included, within thirty days, except for what we must keep for tax or legal records (an invoice, for example). Backups roll off within a further thirty days.

• See it: everything we hold about your family is visible in the app, including every version of the learner profile.
• Change it: grades, settings, and your kid's details are editable in the app.
• Delete it: email hello@pencilbox.io from the address on the account and we will delete the whole family within thirty days and confirm by email. You can also ask for a copy first.
• Stop the emails: reply to any Pencilbox email and we will stop them. Sign-in codes are the exception, since they are how you get in.

California residents have the right to know what we collect, to have it deleted, and not to be discriminated against for asking. The ways above are how to exercise them. We do not sell personal information and have not done so in the past twelve months.

Sign-in is by a code sent to your email, so there is no password to steal. Each family can see only its own rows and files; that rule is enforced in the database itself, not just in the app. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest by our providers. No system is perfect; if we learn of a breach that affects your family we will email you about it as soon as we can and in any case within the time the law requires.

Pencilbox is built for families enrolled with a California charter school. We will sign a student data privacy agreement with your charter on request, and we follow California's student privacy laws for services used for school purposes: no targeted advertising, no selling student information, no profiles for anything other than the school purpose you signed up for.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will email the address on your account before the change takes effect. Questions go to hello@pencilbox.io. The terms of service cover the rest of the relationship.