You Should Know Where Your Private School’s Data Sits
Private school hosting, staff and faculty email, tuition payments and IT support for independent and college-prep private schools — on servers we own in the United States.
Private School Hosting: The Short Answer
Private 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, parent email billed on sends rather than list size, tuition and fee payments, and IT support, all on servers we own in the United States. It suits independent, college-prep and other private schools that want to know exactly where student and staff data sits and who can reach it.
Private school hosting should cover more than a website. A school needs staff and faculty email on its own domain, a school website hosting plan that parents can rely on, and a clear place where records are kept. When these pieces sit with one provider, the board can see who holds the data and what the agreement allows.
Good private school hosting starts with a few plain questions. Where is the data stored? Who can access staff and faculty email? What happens to files if you leave? A short written answer to each one helps a head of school explain the setup to a board or a parent.
School website hosting also affects daily life. Enrollment pages, calendars and tuition links need to load quickly on a phone. Staff and faculty email needs to keep working during busy weeks like registration and report cards. Planning for these peaks is part of choosing private 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 private school hosting, staff and faculty email or school website hosting, contact us and we will walk through your setup.
Private schools that do not receive federal funds are not legally required to follow FERPA, but many adopt it anyway as the privacy standard parents expect. Private school hosting from us is built with that in mind: we keep staff email and school records on U.S. servers we own, whether or not FERPA technically applies to your school.
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 independent private schools did not choose their email platform. It was free, someone set it up years ago, and nobody has revisited it since. That is worth revisiting.
An independent private school’s board and head of school are the ones accountable to parents for how tuition, enrollment and family records are handled, with no district office to fall back on if a vendor changes terms or shuts down a product line. Private school hosting on servers we own gives a business office one place to manage staff accounts, the admissions and tuition pages, and family communications, so a change in vendor, a change in leadership, or a re-accreditation review does not mean scrambling to find out where the school’s own records actually live.
- 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@, tuition@ 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.
- Tuition, fees and fundraising Tuition and fee payments, annual fund giving, event ticketing and auction or gala pages, processed through an account set up for a school. One-time and recurring both supported.
A School Website Parents Can Actually Use
Independent And Non-Affiliated Private Schools
Built for a school that answers to its own board, not a district
A public site, an admissions funnel, staff and faculty mailboxes and re-enrollment forms. Enough to run a full school year without a system built for a much larger district.
Re-enrollment and tuition contracts
Annual re-enrollment, tuition contract signing, deposits and family accounts, handled online so your business office is not chasing paper every spring.
A head of school or business office change doesn’t put your data at risk
Administrations change every few years at most schools. We document what you have, keep every account in the school’s name rather than a departing staff member’s, and train whoever takes over next.
Smaller budgets, a volunteer board and a different buying process — 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
- Tuition, fee and annual fund payment processing — one-time and recurring
- Migration from your current platform over a school break — quoted per school
Private 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 does not legally apply to most private schools, since it only binds schools that receive federal funds. What we do is host on infrastructure we own in the United States, tell you exactly where student data sits, and put vendor commitments in writing — so you can offer parents FERPA-level practices as a matter of choice, not obligation.
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 parents pay tuition through the website?
Yes. Tuition, fees, annual fund giving and event payments can all run through the site, one-time or recurring.
We’re a small independent school under 200 students. Is this overkill?
No. We price this the same way for a 150-student school as a 1,500-student one — per mailbox and per feature you actually use, not a flat enterprise contract sized for a much bigger institution.
Who owns the accounts if our office manager or outside web vendor leaves?
Your school 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 private school hosting cost?
Private school hosting starts with staff and faculty email at $1.95 per user a month, plus the school website, parent email billed on sends, tuition and fee payments, and IT support.
Does private school hosting help with our accreditation review?
Independent-school accreditation reviews (regional associations, ISACS-style state or national bodies) usually ask for enrollment history, staff records and evidence of consistent record-keeping over several years. A school running on borrowed or bundled accounts, or on a platform tied to a previous head of school’s personal login, can lose that continuity. Private school hosting on servers we own keeps staff email, enrollment and tuition records under the school’s own account structure, so pulling together documentation for a self-study or a site visit is an export, not a scramble to recover access from a departed staff member’s inbox.
What happens when our head of school or business office changes?
Private schools often see more leadership turnover than staff turnover, and a head of school or business manager who leaves without a clean handoff can take institutional knowledge of the school’s own systems with them. Because accounts are owned by the school rather than by an individual’s personal login, a new head of school or business office can be handed administrative access on day one, without waiting on a former employee to transfer a domain, an email platform, or a website builder account they set up years earlier.
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