Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and what this covers

A1 STEM Academy ("A1 STEM Academy," "we," "us," or "our") provides live 1:1 tutoring and standardized-test preparation for students in grades 1–12, delivered as live online sessions. This Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information collected through our website at https://a1stemacademy.com (the "Site"), through the enquiries families send us, and in the course of delivering tutoring.

We teach families around the world, so more than one country's privacy law can apply to what we do. Rather than treat people differently depending on where they live, we apply a single standard: the protections and rights set out in this policy are offered to every family we work with, wherever you are. Where the law that applies to you gives you something stronger than what is described here, that stronger protection applies.

This policy covers everything we do: our website at https://a1stemacademy.com, our members' portal at a1stem.academy, and the tutoring itself. It is the only privacy policy that applies.

Contact details for privacy questions, requests, and complaints are in section 17.

2. Information we collect

a. Information a parent or guardian gives us

Our marketing website at https://a1stemacademy.com has no contact form, no login, and no server-side code that receives your data — when you first get in touch you email or call us directly, so your message travels from your own email provider or phone to ours. In that correspondence, and in arranging and delivering tutoring, a parent or guardian typically gives us:

• the parent's or guardian's name, email address, and phone number;
• the student's first name, grade or class, school board or curriculum, and school;
• subjects of interest, availability, and goals such as a target exam or date;
• information shared voluntarily during tutoring — homework, practice tests, marked assignments, progress notes, and similar academic material; and
• billing information such as the name on the account and a payment reference. We do not receive or store full card numbers; payments are handled by the payment provider you use.

Please do not send us health, biometric, government identification numbers, caste or religious information, or other sensitive data. We do not need it, we do not ask for it, and if it arrives unsolicited we will delete it.

b. Information held in the members' portal

In the portal we also hold:

• account details — name, email address, time zone, and a password, which is stored only in hashed form and is never visible to us;
• a phone number and address, collected from parent and tutor accounts only, not from student accounts;
• tutoring activity — enrolments, scheduled and completed sessions, session notes, and invoice or payroll records;
• messages and any files exchanged in course group chats; and
• basic technical data needed to deliver notifications, keep you signed in, and diagnose faults.

c. Information collected automatically

When you visit the Site, our hosting provider and the analytics tools described in section 7 may record standard technical data: IP address (truncated or anonymised where the tool allows it), approximate city-level location, browser and device type, referring page, the pages you viewed, and the date and time. This is used to understand traffic and keep the Site working — not to build a profile of any visitor, and never to profile a child.

d. Information we do not collect

We do not buy personal information from data brokers, we do not run advertising pixels or retargeting tags on the Site, and we do not ask children to create accounts or submit information to us directly through the Site.

3. How we use information

We use what we hold only to run the tutoring you have asked us for: answering enquiries and arranging a demo class, matching a tutor and scheduling sessions, preparing and sharing lesson material, tracking a student's progress and reporting it to their parent, enabling messages between families and tutors, issuing invoices and processing payments, sending service notices and reminders, keeping the accounting records the law requires us to keep, and protecting students, tutors, and our systems from misuse.

We also look at aggregated website analytics to see which pages families find useful, and we use messages of feedback and thanks that parents and students send us in our own marketing — but only after removing names, phone numbers, profile pictures, and anything else that could identify who wrote them. Section 11 of our Terms of Use explains how that works, and we take any of it down on request.

That is the whole list. We do not use personal information for targeted advertising, for profiling, or for automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.

4. Legal bases and consent

We process personal data on the basis of the consent a parent or guardian gives when they contact us and enrol a student, to perform the service you have asked us for, to meet our legal obligations, and for our legitimate interest in operating and improving a tutoring business. For a student's data, we rely on verifiable parental consent as described in section 5.

You can withdraw consent at any time by emailing contact@a1stemacademy.com. Withdrawal does not affect processing already carried out, and if you withdraw consent for data we need in order to teach or bill, we may have to stop providing the service.

5. Children's privacy

Every one of our students is a minor, and we treat their information as the most sensitive we hold. Different countries set different ages at which a child can consent for themselves — so rather than track which threshold applies to which family, we apply the strictest rule to everyone: we require the consent of a parent or legal guardian for every student, at every age, in every country.

a. How a student's account works

A parent or legal guardian must create and control the account used for a student. A student cannot register themselves, or register while representing themselves as their own guardian. The parent supplies the contact details; we collect no phone number or address from a student account. The parent can see the account, and can ask us to change or close it at any time.

b. What a student can send us directly

Once their parent has set up the account, a student does share information with us directly, and we want to be plain about that. A student takes part in the course group chat with their tutor — their parent is a member of that chat too and can read it — and can upload homework, practice work, and similar learning material to it. Anything a student writes or uploads there is held as part of their tutoring record.

We ask students to use the chat only for their learning, and not to post personal details about themselves or anyone else. We do not require a student to provide any information beyond what their tutoring needs, and never as a condition of taking part.

Our marketing website at https://a1stemacademy.com is different: it has no accounts, no chat, and no uploads, and offers no way for a child to submit anything to us.

c. What we never do with a student's information

• track them, monitor their behaviour, or profile them;
• show them advertising, or use their information to target advertising at them or anyone else;
• sell or share their information; or
• anything else likely to have a detrimental effect on a child's well-being.

d. Feedback and thank-you messages

Students and parents often send us messages of thanks or feedback, and we sometimes use those in our own marketing — on this website, in printed material, or on social media. We do this only after removing names, profile pictures, phone numbers, and anything else that could identify the person who wrote them, so that nothing published points back to a student. We never use a student's schoolwork this way, only what they or their parent wrote to us about their experience.

If a message of yours or your child's appears anywhere and you would rather it did not, email contact@a1stemacademy.com and we will take it down.

e. What a parent or guardian can ask for, at any time

• to review the personal information we hold about their child, including their chat messages and uploads;
• to have it corrected;
• to refuse to permit its further collection or use; and
• to have it deleted — understanding that if we delete the information we need in order to teach or bill, we may have to end the tutoring engagement.

Email contact@a1stemacademy.com to make any of these requests. We will verify that you are the child's parent or guardian — ordinarily by confirming the request from the email address or phone number already on the student's file — before we act.

f. If a child contacts us on their own

If we learn that we hold information a child sent us outside their tutoring and without parental involvement, we will delete it promptly unless a parent or guardian confirms they want us to keep it. If you believe a child has given us information without your consent, email contact@a1stemacademy.com and we will remove it.

6. Student work and education records

We are a private tutoring provider. We are not a school and we do not receive federal funding, so the laws that govern how schools handle student records do not apply to us directly. If we ever provide tutoring under contract with a school and receive education records from it, we will use those records only for the tutoring that school engaged us for, will not redisclose them, and will meet whatever obligations that school's own governing law places on us.

Homework, practice tests, essays, and progress notes created during tutoring are used to teach that student and to report progress to their parent or guardian. We do not publish a student's work, name, or photograph without the written permission of a parent or guardian. Where we show a message a family has sent us, we remove names, profile pictures, phone numbers, and other identifying details first, so that nothing published identifies a student — including where the message mentions a grade or test score. See section 11 of our Terms of Use.

7. Cookies, analytics, and tracking signals

The Site uses no advertising cookies, no retargeting pixels, and no social media tracking tags. Depending on configuration, it may use one or both of the following analytics tools:

You can block or delete cookies through your browser settings, use a browser extension that blocks analytics, or install Google's opt-out add-on. Blocking them does not affect your ability to use the Site.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track

Where your browser or extension sends a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, we treat it as a valid request to opt out of any sale or sharing of your personal information and of targeted advertising. Because we do not sell or share personal information or serve targeted advertising in the first place, honouring the signal changes nothing about how we treat you — but the signal is respected. We do not respond to legacy "Do Not Track" headers, which have no agreed standard.

8. How we share information

We disclose personal information only in these situations:

• Tutors and staff. The tutor assigned to a student sees what they need in order to teach that student. Tutors are bound by confidentiality obligations and may not use student information for any other purpose.
• Service providers. Companies that process data on our behalf and under our instructions — email and calendar hosting, website hosting and analytics, video conferencing for online sessions, and payment processing. They may use the data only to provide their service to us.
• Legal and safety. Where we are required by law, court order, or a lawful request from a public authority, or where disclosure is necessary to protect the safety of a child, our staff, or the public. Where a child's safety is at risk, we will act on it.
• Business transfer. If A1 STEM Academy is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, personal information may transfer to the successor, which will remain bound by this policy or give notice of a change. We will notify affected families.
• With your permission. Anything that would identify you or your child in public — for example, naming a student in our marketing — only with the parent's or guardian's written consent, which may be withdrawn at any time. De-identified messages shown on the Site are covered by section 11 of our Terms of Use.

9. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising

We have not sold, and do not sell, personal information, and we do not disclose it to anyone else for their own advertising. We do not run targeted advertising or profiling of any kind, for adults or for children. The one way your words may appear in our own marketing is as a de-identified testimonial, described in section 5 and in section 11 of our Terms of Use.

10. How long we keep information

We keep personal information only for as long as it is needed for the purposes described in this policy, and then delete it. What "needed" means depends on the category:

You can ask us to delete your information at any time (section 13). We will do so unless we are required to keep it — for instance, to satisfy a tax or accounting obligation or to resolve a live dispute.

11. How we protect information

We use industry-standard safeguards: encryption in transit (HTTPS) across both websites and the services we use; passwords stored only as hashes, never in readable form; access limited to the staff and tutors who need it, and removed promptly when someone leaves; and multi-factor authentication on the accounts we administer.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a personal data breach occurs, we will notify affected individuals and the relevant authorities as and when the law that applies requires, within the timeframes it sets.

12. International transfers

We teach families around the world, so personal data you give us may be stored and processed in a country other than your own — wherever we or our service providers operate — and those countries' data protection laws may differ from the ones where you live. Wherever it goes, it stays protected as described in this policy. We make international transfers only where the law that applies to you permits it, and not to any country it restricts.

13. Your rights over your information

Privacy law differs from country to country, and some of the rights below are guaranteed in some places and not others. We do not think that is a good reason to treat families differently, so we offer all of them to everyone we work with, wherever you live. Where a student is a minor, these rights are exercised by their parent or guardian.

• Know and access — what personal information we hold about you or your child, where it came from, why we have it, and anyone we disclosed it to.
• Correct — anything inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date.
• Delete — information we hold, subject to any legal obligation that requires us to keep it.
• Portability — a copy of the information you gave us, in a portable format.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, as easily as it was given.
• Object and opt out — of any sale of personal information, sharing for advertising, targeted advertising, or profiling with legal or similarly significant effects. We do none of these (section 9).
• Nominate — another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapacitated.
• Non-discrimination — we will never deny service, change prices, or lower quality because you exercised a privacy right.
• Complain — to us, and if we cannot put it right, to the data protection or consumer authority where you live.

How to exercise them. Email contact@a1stemacademy.com with "Privacy Request" in the subject line, or call +1 201-874-4618. We will respond within the time the law that applies to you allows, and will tell you if we need an extension that law permits. To protect student information we will verify your identity — ordinarily by confirming the request from the email address or phone number already on file. Someone may make a request on your behalf with your written permission, and we may still contact you to confirm it.

If we say no. We will tell you why, and you can ask us to look again. If you are still unhappy, you can take it to the data protection or consumer authority where you live — we will tell you how to reach them if you ask.

Your side of it. When you make a request, please do not impersonate anyone else or leave out information we need in order to answer it properly.

14. Calls, texts, and email

When you give us your phone number or email address, you are asking us to reply, and we may contact you by phone, text message, WhatsApp, or email about your enquiry, your child's schedule, and your account. These are service communications, and they continue while you are a customer.

We send marketing messages only to people who have asked us to. Every marketing email includes an unsubscribe link and our postal address, as marketing law requires, and we act on unsubscribe requests promptly. To stop marketing texts or calls, reply STOP or tell us in writing at contact@a1stemacademy.com; you may still receive messages needed to run a session you have booked. We do not use automated dialling systems or prerecorded marketing calls, and we do not give or sell your number to anyone else for marketing.

15. Third-party links

The Site links to third-party sites such as our Facebook and Instagram pages, and our blog may link to external resources. Those sites have their own privacy policies and we are not responsible for their practices. Please read the policy of any site before giving it your information.

16. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our services or the law change. The "last updated" date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we use personal information — particularly a child's — we will give notice by email to current families before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask for fresh consent.

17. Contact and grievance redressal

For any privacy question, request, or complaint, whatever law it is made under:

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take the matter to the data protection or consumer authority for the country where you live. Ask us and we will point you to the right one.

See also our Terms of Use.