You Should Know Where Your Charter School’s Data Sits
Charter school hosting, staff and faculty email, enrollment systems and IT support for charter schools and charter networks — on servers we own in the United States.
Charter School Hosting: The Short Answer
Charter school hosting from LiberationTek covers staff and faculty email on your school’s own domain from $1.95 per user a month, the school website, enrollment and lottery registration forms, parent email billed on sends rather than list size, and IT support, all on servers we own in the United States. It suits charter schools and charter management organizations that want to know exactly where student and staff data sits and who can reach it, without waiting on a district IT department that a charter school does not have.
Charter school hosting should cover more than a website. A charter school needs staff and faculty email on its own domain, a school website hosting plan that families can rely on, and a clear record of where student and staff data sits. When these pieces sit with one provider, the board can see who holds the data and what the agreement allows.
Good charter school hosting starts with plain questions. Where is the data stored? Who can reach staff and faculty email? What happens to files and mailboxes if the school changes providers? A short written answer to each helps a school leader explain the setup to a board, an authorizer or a parent.
School website hosting also shapes daily life. Enrollment pages, lottery notices and calendars need to load quickly on a phone, especially during application season. Staff and faculty email needs to keep working during testing windows and report card weeks. Planning for those peaks is part of choosing charter school hosting well.
For general background on student privacy, the U.S. Department of Education publishes resources at Student Privacy. This is general information and not legal advice, so ask your school’s counsel how privacy rules apply to you. If you would like help planning charter school hosting, staff and faculty email or school website hosting, contact us and we will walk through your setup.
Charter schools are public schools, and as public schools receiving federal funds, FERPA applies to your charter the same way it applies to any traditional public school. Charter school hosting from us is built with that in mind: charter school hosting keeps staff email and student records on U.S. servers we own.
Reconsidering The Platform You Never Chose
The questions a board should be able to answer
Where does student and staff data physically sit, who can reach it, what does your agreement actually permit, and what happens if those terms change. Those are fair questions to ask of any platform, including ours. Most schools have never asked them of the one they are already on, and parents increasingly do ask.
Nonprofit and education licensing keeps changing
Discounted and donated licensing for nonprofit organizations has been reduced in recent years, and schools that built their entire operation on donated seats have had to re-plan budgets with little warning. Owning the relationship removes that exposure.
What actually changes for your staff
Mailboxes, calendars and shared drives work the way they already do — on a phone, in a browser, in a desktop client. What changes is who holds the data and who you call when something breaks. We will tell you plainly what you would give up, because for some schools the answer is that this is not yet the right move.
Most charter schools did not choose their email platform. It came bundled with a free education-platform grant, or from whoever set the school up in its first year — and unlike a district school, there is no central IT department to revisit it for you. That is worth doing yourselves.
Charter authorizers routinely ask for enrollment records, attendance data or financial documentation as part of an annual review or a renewal application, and a charter operating on borrowed or bundled accounts can struggle to produce a clean export on short notice. Charter school hosting on servers we own keeps enrollment forms, staff email and site records in one place your business office actually controls, so pulling together an authorizer request is a matter of exporting records you already hold rather than requesting access from a platform vendor who has never heard of your renewal deadline.
- Per-mailbox pricing you can put in a budget Liberation Email from $1.95 per user a month, Mail Pro at $7.95, billed annually if that matches your fiscal year, with no surprise reclassification when your enrollment crosses a threshold.
- Shared addresses departments actually need office@, admissions@, athletics@, registrar@ and grade-level or homeroom groups — set up so messages route to the right people and do not sit in one overwhelmed inbox.
- Retention and records the way a school needs them Mail retention and archiving configured for how long your school actually has to keep records, so that a records request or a personnel matter does not turn into an archaeology project.
Staff, Faculty And Student Email On Our Servers
FERPA, COPPA And What A School Is Responsible For
FERPA and education records
Student education records carry disclosure obligations, and the vendors handling them matter. We will walk your administration through where student data sits in the systems you run, who can reach it, and what your agreements with each vendor actually say.
COPPA and students under thirteen
Accounts issued to children under thirteen bring their own consent requirements. If your school issues student accounts, this is a conversation worth having once, properly.
State student-privacy laws
Many states have added their own student data privacy statutes on top of federal law, and they are not identical. We will tell you which ones apply to your school and what they mean for your vendor list.
Nobody expects a head of school to be a privacy lawyer. But the questions parents ask have specific answers, and a board should have them.
- The pages parents open every week Calendar, lunch menu, athletics schedules, forms, teacher pages, re-enrollment and the emergency banner nobody thinks about until the morning of an ice storm — built so a staff member can update them without calling anybody.
- Admissions that actually collects inquiries Inquiry forms, tour scheduling, application downloads and an admissions funnel you can see, instead of a contact form that routes to an inbox nobody checks over the summer.
- Fees and fundraising Activity fee payments, field trip forms, event ticketing and PTO or booster-club fundraising pages, processed through an account set up for the school. One-time and recurring both supported.
A School Website Parents Can Actually Use
Independent Charters And Charter Networks
Built for an independent charter, not scaled down from a district contract
A public site, an enrollment and lottery registration form, staff mailboxes and a parent portal. Enough to run the school year without a system that needs a dedicated administrator to maintain it.
Enrollment, lottery and open-registration forms
Open-enrollment windows, lottery registration and family account management, handled online — charter schools are tuition-free, so this is about registration and compliance reporting, not billing.
A charter board can hand this off and it still works
Charter leadership and authorizers change. We document what you have, keep every account in the school’s name rather than a departing administrator’s, and train whoever takes over next.
A leaner budget and a governing board to answer to — but the same infrastructure underneath.
- Liberation Email from $1.95 per user/mo; Mail Pro $7.95 per user/mo
- Hub for Teams $7.49 per user/mo
- Liberation Campaign send-based: $10/mo for 10,000 emails, $20/mo for 40,000 — a school with a 2,000-parent list mailing monthly sends 2,000 emails
- Website Builder $10.99/mo at the budget end, or a built site priced as a project
- CodeGuard encrypted off-site backups from $2.09/mo; SiteLock Fix $14.99/mo or Defend $49.99/mo
- Activity fees, field trip payments and booster or PTO fundraising processing — one-time and recurring
- Migration from your current platform over a school break — quoted per school
What It Costs
Per seat, monthly, so it goes straight into a per-pupil budget your board can review.
Charter School FAQs
Can you move our school off its current email platform?
Yes. We migrate mailboxes with history, calendars and shared drives, and we schedule the cutover over a break so it does not land in the middle of a grading period. We will also tell you honestly what your staff would be giving up.
How much does staff email cost per person?
From $1.95 per mailbox a month, with Mail Pro at $7.95. Schools generally price it against the administrative time they currently spend supporting a free platform with no support line.
Do you provide student accounts as well as staff accounts?
Yes, and we will talk through the consent and privacy obligations that come with issuing accounts to students under thirteen before you commit to a structure.
Is your hosting FERPA compliant?
FERPA compliance is a property of your school’s practices and its agreements with vendors, not a checkbox a host can tick alone. What we do is host on infrastructure we own in the United States, tell you exactly where student data sits, and put the vendor commitments in writing so your administration can meet its obligations.
When is the best time of year to switch?
Summer, almost always. Eleven weeks is comfortable for a full migration including email, website and payments. Christmas break works for a smaller scope.
Can families complete enrollment and lottery forms through the website?
Yes. Open-enrollment windows, lottery applications and required compliance forms can all run through the site, with results routed to your registrar automatically.
We are a single-site charter with a small staff, not a district. Is this overkill?
No. A single-site charter runs a scaled-down version of the same thing — a public site, an enrollment form, and a handful of staff mailboxes — and we price it per seat accordingly.
Who owns the accounts if our office manager or IT lead leaves?
Your organization does. We put accounts in the school’s name, document the setup, and train the next person. This is the single most common mess we are called in to clean up.
What does charter school hosting cost?
Charter school hosting starts with staff and faculty email at $1.95 per user a month, plus the school website, enrollment and lottery registration forms, parent email billed on sends, and IT support.
Does charter school hosting work for a charter network with multiple campuses?
Yes. Charter school hosting scales the same way for a single-site charter and a multi-campus charter management organization. Each campus can have its own staff directory and its own set of accounts, while an office at the network level keeps the ability to add, move or remove a staff account across every campus from one admin panel. That matters at charter renewal time and during rapid growth years, when a network is opening a new campus and needs accounts provisioned before the first day of staff onboarding, not weeks into the semester.
What happens to our school's data if our charter is not renewed or the school closes?
Because the hosting, email and website all run on servers we own rather than a platform tied to your authorizer or a school-management vendor, your data does not disappear or get frozen if your charter agreement ends. A closing or non-renewed charter can export its records, staff email archives and enrollment history and hand them to the authorizer or a successor operator in an orderly way, on a timeline the school controls, rather than losing access the moment a subscription or district-issued account is deactivated.
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Bring This To Your Board With Real Numbers
Book a call and we will put together per-seat pricing, a migration timeline built around your school calendar, and a plain summary your board can read without a translator.
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