This policy explains how US School Ratings handles information when you browse the site or contact us. It applies to usschoolratings.com and does not govern schools, districts, data providers, or other websites we link to.
Information you provide
The site does not currently offer user accounts or a hosted contact form. If you email us, we receive the address, message, attachments, and other information you choose to provide. We use that information to respond, investigate corrections, maintain records of our work, and protect the site.
Information produced when you browse
Our hosting and delivery providers may process ordinary technical logs such as IP address, requested URL, timestamp, browser or device information, referrer, and error details. These logs support security, reliability, abuse prevention, and troubleshooting. Retention and infrastructure-level processing may also be governed by those providers' terms.
Search
The school and district search runs in your browser. As you type, the site requests a small matching index file from our own domain and filters the results locally. The results-page URL includes your query and filters, which may appear in hosting logs, browser history, and links you share. We do not create search accounts or intentionally associate search text with a named user.
Analytics
We use a website analytics service hosted at stats.kzfm.com to understand aggregate traffic and improve the site. When a page loads, your browser requests its analytics script. The integration is configured to honor a browser's Do Not Track preference and to exclude URL query strings and fragments from analytics events. The service may process technical information such as the page visited, referrer, browser and device characteristics, approximate location derived from an IP address, and visit timing. We do not use this service to create school-search accounts or to sell personal profiles.
Advertising
We use a Google AdSense account to prepare advertising for the site. The site currently uses account-verification metadata rather than loading the AdSense ad-serving script on every page. If ad serving is enabled, Google and its advertising partners may process IP address, device and browser information, page activity, advertising identifiers, cookies, or similar technologies to select, deliver, limit, and measure ads.
Where required, visitors will be given consent or privacy controls through Google’s certified consent-management process or another certified provider. Google’s handling of information is described in its privacy information for sites that use Google services.
School comparisons and checklist
The comparison shortlist saves school identifiers and names in your browser’s local storage. The visit checklist saves only which questions you have checked. These features do not send your shortlist or checkmarks to an account or a hosted database. Use Clear in the shortlist or Reset checkmarks on the checklist to remove those saved values. Comparison links include the selected school identifiers; CSV files are generated in your browser.
Cookies and local storage
We do not currently set first-party advertising cookies ourselves. Analytics, infrastructure, consent, and—when enabled—advertising providers may use cookies, local storage, truncated identifiers, or similar technologies according to their configuration and the choices available to you.
Third-party links
Profiles and articles link to schools, districts, government sources, Pexels, and other external sites. Following those links allows the destination to process information under its own privacy policy. We do not control those services.
Children's privacy
The site publishes institutional public-school information for a general audience. It is not designed to collect personal information directly from children. Please do not send private student records or sensitive information by email.
Retention, disclosure, and security
We retain communications only as long as reasonably useful for the purpose received, legal obligations, security, or correction history. We may disclose information when required by law, to investigate abuse, to protect rights and safety, or to service providers working on our behalf. No internet transmission or storage system can be guaranteed completely secure.
Your questions
For a privacy question or request, email contact@usschoolratings.com. Laws differ by location, so we may need enough information to understand and verify a request.