What we collect, and what we do with it.

When you book a call. The parent’s name, the student’s name and year, an email address for each, and a phone number. If you answer the optional questions afterwards, we also keep what you tell us about schools, scores, grades, activities, and what you are hoping to get from working with us.

When you speak to us. The person who takes your call keeps notes of the conversation so that your counselor starts with the full picture.

When you enroll. The agreement you signed, the name you typed on it, the date you signed, the plan you chose, and a record of what has been paid. Card and bank details are entered on our payment provider’s secure page and never pass through our servers.

While we work together. Your student’s plan and each version of it, the notes your counselor writes after each meeting, the tasks your student is working on, the documents you or your student upload, and the messages in your family’s threads.

We use what you give us to do the work you hired us for: to prepare and update your student’s plan, to run and schedule meetings, to keep you informed about your engagement and your payments, and to answer you when you write to us.

We send email about your calls, your agreement, your payments, and your student’s progress. We do not send marketing email to families who are working with us.

We do not sell your family’s information, and we do not share it for advertising. There is no advertising tracking on this site and no analytics product of any kind.

We use a small number of service providers to run the business: hosting, our database, email delivery, payment processing, and calendar and document tools. Each of them receives only what it needs to do its part, and none of them may use your information for anything else.

We will disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the safety of a student or another person.

Your family. Parents see their own family’s engagement, plan, billing and documents. A student with their own sign-in sees their plan, their tasks and their own messages.

Your counselor. Your counselor sees the students assigned to them and nobody else’s. What we pay a counselor is never part of anything a family is shown.

The Scholar’s Bureau. The firm’s administrators can see every family’s records in order to run the business, and use that access only for that.

These limits are enforced in the database itself, so they apply to every screen and every request the same way.

Most of the students we work with are under 18. A parent or guardian enrolls the student, signs the agreement, and stays in charge of the engagement.

A student receives a sign-in of their own only when their parent has agreed to it on the agreement and the student is at least 13. Their sign-in is theirs: it uses their own email address, not the parent’s.

There is no public sign-up on this site. Every account is created by The Scholar’s Bureau for a family we are working with.

We keep your family’s records for as long as we are working together, and for as long afterwards as we need them to answer questions about the engagement, to keep our accounts, and to meet our legal obligations.

When you remove a document from your documents page, the file is deleted then and there. Otherwise, document contents are deleted 90 days after an engagement ends, and within 30 days of you removing something. When a document is deleted we keep only a line recording that it existed, not its contents.

You can see and correct your information. Write to us and we will tell you what we hold about your family, correct anything that is wrong, or delete it, subject to what we are required to keep.

You can delete an uploaded document yourself, from your documents page, at any time.

You can end the engagement at any time by emailing thescholarsbureau@gmail.com. The cancellation page opens that email for you. Ending the engagement and deleting your records are two separate requests; ask for both if you want both.

Your information is stored on encrypted infrastructure, sign-ins are protected by passwords that we never see, and payments are handled by a payment provider that is certified for it. Access inside the firm is limited to the people who need it for their work.

No system is perfectly secure. If we learn of a breach affecting your family’s information, we will tell you.

Write to thescholarsbureau@gmail.com with any question about this page or about your family’s information, and a person will answer.

If we change this page, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes are told to families we are working with directly.