Privacy Policy

This website is the class site for the Technology and Social Sciences courses taught by Paul Burkhard at Highland High School, Weld RE-9 School District. It is maintained by Mr. Burkhard for his students and their families.

This policy explains what information this site handles, why, who can see it, and what choices you have. It is written for students and parents, so it is in plain language rather than legal language. If anything here is unclear, please ask.

The website itself collects nothing

Reading any page on this site requires no account and no login. The site does not run analytics software, does not use advertising or tracking pixels, and does not set cookies. It does not build a profile of visitors, and it does not know who you are.

What your own browser saves on your device

Some pages save a small amount of information in your own browser so they load quickly and do not have to re-download the class schedule every time. This includes a copy of the class schedule and, for the teacher only, a saved sign-in code for editing the schedule.

This information stays on your device. It is never sent anywhere, and no one else can read it. Clearing your browser data removes it, and the pages will still work normally afterward.

Fonts and links to other companies

Page headings use a typeface loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests that font file from Google. Google may record the request, including the address your device is connecting from. No information about you is sent as part of that request.

Many pages link out to Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Classroom, YouTube, and other sites used in class. Once you follow a link, you are on that company's service and its own privacy policy applies, not this one. No videos or forms are embedded directly into these pages.

What is collected in class

Assignments, quizzes, and projects in these classes are often completed through Google Forms, Google Sheets, or Google Docs, which are linked from this site rather than hosted on it. When a student completes one, the following is typically collected:

• The student's name
• The student's school email address
• Their class period
• Their answers to the assignment

Some projects are simulations that ask a student to plan a budget or make choices for an imaginary adult life. The salary, job, and location in those projects are assigned by the teacher and are fiction. They are not information about the student or their family, and they are not treated as if they were.

Why it is collected, and who sees it

It is collected for one reason: so the work can be assigned, graded, returned, and recorded as a grade. Mr. Burkhard is the only person who reviews student responses. Files holding student work are restricted, not public, and are not linked from any public page.

Student work from these classes is never sold, never shared with advertisers, and never used for any purpose outside of teaching the class. It is not used to train any product or service.

Student names are not published on this site

Some class projects assign each student a different topic, and the list of who has which topic is posted on a class page so students can see their assignment and, in some projects, who they have been paired with. Those lists identify students by their initials, not by name. If two students in the same class period share the same initials, a number is added to each so the two can be told apart.

Grades are never posted publicly, in any form.

Initials are used for a specific reason. A full name on a public web page can be found by a search engine, and it can stay findable for years. That matters most in projects where students are assigned a position to argue rather than choosing one, which is common in Civil Government. A student should not have their name permanently attached in public to an argument they were handed.

Initials are not a disguise, and this policy does not pretend otherwise. Students in the same class period will usually recognize one another, which is fine, because they are in the room together. The purpose is to keep a student's name from being tied to their classwork on the open internet, not to hide students from each other.

If you would rather your student's initials not appear either, tell me and I will use a number instead. You do not need to give a reason, it has no effect on their grade, and no one in class is told.

At the end of each school year, a copy of the class pages is saved to this site as a record of what the class did that year. That archive goes back many years. Pages in it from earlier years may include student names, which were published under the district release in effect at the time. The initials practice described above applies going forward.

There is currently no fixed schedule for deleting older class pages or older student work. That is being reviewed. In the meantime, if you would like a page removed, or a name removed from an archived page, contact me and I will take care of it. You do not need a reason.

You may ask, at any time, to:

• Have your student's name left off any page on this site
• Have a name or a page removed from the archive
• See what work of your student's is held, and where
• Have your student's work deleted once it is no longer needed for a grade

Requests are handled directly and do not require a form.

This site is built to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. If you run into a page you cannot use with a keyboard, a screen reader, or magnification, please tell me. Describe the page and what happened, and I will fix it and get you the material another way in the meantime.

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Anything that meaningfully affects what is collected or published will also be mentioned in class and, where it matters, sent home.