Data Privacy Overview
October 22, 2026 · Replaces the overview of July 13, 2026
Not a contract. The School Data Privacy Agreement is the binding document, and this is a plain-language summary of it.
Co-Teacher is an app a teacher uses to photograph handwritten student work. It reads the work, scores it and gives feedback, finds the misconceptions, suggests small groups for reteaching, and generates materials to support the reteach. Teachers use it; your school’s Co-Teacher has no student accounts and no student sign-in. The agreement puts us on the same FERPA footing as the other vendors that already hold your student records, so there are no new parent consent forms. Section 8 covers FERPA, COPPA and the state laws. This overview gives the answers you’ll want to have before teachers at your school start using Co-Teacher to check work with student names.
The short version
- Your school owns its students’ data; we act on your behalf.
- We never sell it and never use it for advertising.
- Student work is never used to train AI models, ours or anyone’s.
- Our AI providers keep nothing after each analysis runs.
- Everything is stored and processed in the United States.
- We delete your data within 30 days when you ask, including backups within 30 days after that, and certify the deletion in writing on request.
- If anyone were ever to get unauthorized access to your student data, we would tell you within 72 hours of finding out.
- Co-Teacher scores and analyzes for the teacher to read; it records no grade, and the teacher decides what to do with what it finds.
- Until your school signs the data privacy agreement, teachers use it without student names.
- Signing takes a few minutes by email, and it is not a purchase.
1. What Co-Teacher collects
| Data | Collected? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Images of student work | Yes | Photos a teacher takes of handwritten or printed work, or pages scanned and emailed from a school copier. |
| Student name | Only at a signed school | Whatever is written on the work, or what the teacher enters. Before your school signs, teachers upload work with no names. |
| Grade level, subject, state | Yes | To align analysis to the right standards. |
| Assignment prompt, rubric, curriculum context | If the teacher adds it | Improves the analysis. |
| Roster of student names | Only at a signed school | Built from the names on the work, or entered by the teacher. |
| Generated analysis | Yes | Scores, feedback, misconceptions, suggested groups, lessons, worksheets and other materials, reports. |
| Teacher and leader name, email, title | Yes | To run accounts, send notices, and complete the signature block on the agreement. |
| Date of birth, home address, contact details, ID numbers, IEP or 504 documents, health, disability or discipline information | No | Not needed, and the agreement asks schools not to provide them. If one appears in a photo, we treat the photo as student data, store nothing from it as a separate field, and delete it on the same schedule. |
2. Before your school signs: no-names use
A teacher can try Co-Teacher before anyone at your school signs anything. At the first scan, the teacher confirms that, until the school signs the agreement, they will upload work with no student names on it: a code, a made-up name, or nothing. Co-Teacher does not block or flag an upload that has a name on it, and we protect every upload with the same security either way.
3. The agreement, and how to sign it
Our School Data Privacy Agreement is one document, with a New York version that adds the Education Law 2-d and Part 121 terms. A principal, head of school, or network or district leader signs it by email in a few minutes. You can read it any time at co-teacher.com/legal/school-agreement. A teacher can send it to you from the app, or you can request it yourself. Once signed, it covers every Co-Teacher account at your school, including teachers who join later and the work they uploaded before. If Simovia is ever acquired, we tell you in writing, the buyer is bound by your signed agreement, and the transaction is not a sale of student data.
4. How the AI works
Co-Teacher sends the photo and the teacher’s context to outside AI model providers to produce the analysis and materials. Those calls run through Vercel AI Gateway with zero data retention turned on for our account: the gateway stores nothing and routes only to providers that have agreed to zero-retention terms. Today those providers are Google (Gemini models), OpenAI and Anthropic (Claude models), and the same models can be served by Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI when a primary provider is unavailable. One more, TypeSafe AI, receives names only as text, never the work itself, and matches a name read from a paper to the teacher’s class list. Translation of family-facing materials runs through Google Cloud Translation under our own account, which holds text in memory only while translating it. None of them stores student work after the response, and none may use it for training. We do not use provider features that would store student data, such as prompt caching. All of it happens in the United States. The current list, with each provider’s terms, is at co-teacher.com/legal/subprocessors.
The output is instructional analysis for the teacher. It is not a grade of record; Co-Teacher does not enter anything in a gradebook, student record or report card; and it can be wrong. The teacher decides what to do with it. No decision about a student is made automatically.
To improve accuracy, we keep copies of student work from a school’s accounts with the student’s name and every other direct identifier removed and use them inside the company to check and improve our prompts and analysis. These samples are never used to train a model, never leave the company, and never appear in marketing. A school can ask us to exclude its samples at any time.
5. Where data lives, and who can see it
- Hosted on Supabase, Vercel and Amazon Web Services, in United States data centers. Encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2 or higher) and at rest (AES-256).
- Access limited to the people who need it to run the Service, with role-based permissions, unique accounts and multi-factor authentication for administrative access. Row-level access controls in the database. Administrative activity in our cloud infrastructure is logged and kept for 90 days, and our server logs carry no student names and expire after 30 days.
- Everyone with access to student data completes privacy training before access and every year.
- Your school’s data is used only to provide the Service to your school. It is never pooled in a way that exposes one school’s data to another.
- A parent who uses Co-Teacher at home with their own child has a separate account and sees nothing from your school.
- Our security program is aligned to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and summarized in Schedule 2 of the agreement.
- We carry cyber and data risk insurance at $1,000,000 for each claim and $1,000,000 in the aggregate, with a certificate on request.
6. How long we keep data, and deletion
- While your school is active, we keep student data so teachers never lose work unexpectedly. An individual account that has been inactive for 12 months is deleted, with notice.
- Ask at any time, including mid-year, and we delete specific data or all of it within 30 days, at our vendors too, with backups purged within 30 days after that. Within 30 days after the agreement ends we delete everything the same way.
- Before deletion we can give you an export in a common electronic format. On request we provide a written Certificate of Deletion signed by an officer.
- If a parent asks to see, correct or delete their child’s work, they come to you. We help you answer and never respond to a parent directly.
- We never delete student data because a bill is unpaid.
7. If something goes wrong
If we become aware of unauthorized access to or disclosure of your student data, we notify you within 72 hours, with what happened, what is affected, what we have done, and a named contact, and we keep you updated. We do not contact families or regulators about an incident at your school without your approval unless the law requires it. Where an incident is our fault, we pay the notification costs the law requires. Our vendors are required to notify us of incidents without undue delay.
8. The laws, in plain terms
- FERPA. We act as a “school official” with a legitimate educational interest, under your direct control, which lets your school share student records with us without separate parent consent. The agreement is what establishes that control.
- COPPA. No student uses your school’s Co-Teacher, so no child gives us information directly through your school. For a student under 13, your school provides the consent on the parent’s behalf for this educational purpose, as the FTC’s guidance for schools permits.
- Florida. We meet the operator duties of section 1006.1494, Florida Statutes, and the contract terms in Rule 6A-1.09550.
- Texas. We meet the operator duties of Texas Education Code Chapter 32, Subchapter D, with deletion in 30 days rather than the 60 the statute allows.
- New York. For a district, BOCES or charter school, Education Law 2-d and Part 121 apply. Our New York Attachment goes with the agreement automatically: the Part 121 contractor commitments, the supplemental information your school publishes with its Parents’ Bill of Rights, our acknowledgment of your bill of rights, our Data Security and Privacy Plan, and a NIST summary. It is at co-teacher.com/legal/school-agreement/new-york. Incident notice is 72 hours, faster than the seven days the law allows.
- State AI rules. States and large districts are adding rules for AI in schools, and most of the duty falls on the district rather than the vendor. Rules that restrict the tools students use do not reach Co-Teacher, because students do not use the one your school provides. Rules that restrict how teachers use AI turn on whether it decides something about a student: New York City, for instance, permits approved AI for planning, translation and messages, but not for grading. Co-Teacher sits on the permitted side. It hands the teacher analysis to read, records no grade anywhere, and decides nothing about a student. Student work never trains a model.
- Private and religious schools. FERPA may not apply to you, and 2-d does not. The agreement applies in full anyway, as a contract, so your families get the same protections.
9. What we can sign
- Our School Data Privacy Agreement, by email, in minutes. The default for a single school.
- Your own data privacy agreement, if your district or network has one. Send it to privacy@co-teacher.com.
- The Student Data Privacy Consortium’s National Data Privacy Agreement, including the state version for your state where one exists, with our exhibits prefilled.
10. Our vendors
Every outside company that touches data for Co-Teacher is listed at co-teacher.com/legal/subprocessors, with what it does, whether it sees student data, where it processes, and how long it keeps anything. Signed schools get 30 days’ notice before we add or replace a vendor that will process student data, and may object.
11. Contact
Privacy and agreements: privacy@co-teacher.com. Security: security@co-teacher.com. The agreement: co-teacher.com/legal/school-agreement. Our privacy policy: co-teacher.com/legal/privacy.
Simovia, Inc., a Delaware corporation, 2423 SW 147th Ave #2225, Miami, FL 33185.