Youth & Student Privacy

Scope

This policy covers every participant under 18 in any Connect-IT 360 or SharkMakers program, and the parents or guardians who enroll them. Because we operate independently of traditional public school models, we maintain our own compliance-first standards rather than relying on a district's.

Child safety and interaction guardrails

A signed agreement before any adult works with a student. Every mentor, speaker, judge and volunteer registers with us and signs the SharkMakers Volunteer Agreement first. It is a condition of taking part, not a formality.
No one-to-one contact. That agreement prohibits private one-to-one communication with a minor unless it is expressly authorized and runs through an approved, observable program channel. It also prohibits meeting, transporting, photographing or recording a minor outside approved events and supervised sessions.
No private channels. Adults are prohibited from requesting or using a minor student's personal phone number, personal email, social media account or private messaging app. Contact runs through the program.
Screening where it is required. A volunteer may be required to complete a background check or other screening - by us, by a school district, by a host site, or under applicable law - before working with minors, and high school volunteer service is delayed or suspended until any required clearance is complete. We do not claim that every adult in the program has been background checked, because that is not what the agreement requires and it is not what we can evidence.
Supervised digital spaces. Virtual check-ins, project collaboration and milestone reviews happen in supervised environments. Adults interact with high school youth only through tracked, structured workflows.

Data minimization

We collect only what the program needs. The event registration form asks which event you are registering for, your name, email address and phone number, whether you are coming as a student, parent or guardian, educator, mentor, business partner or other, and optionally your school or organization, your grade this fall (students only), your city and any comments. It also offers two optional boxes - to be told when high school season registration opens, and to receive SharkMakers news - and records which of them you check. Neither is required. The high school interest list asks for the student's name, an email address, a phone number, their high school, their grade this fall and any comments. Nothing else is stored.

Enrollment adds what participation needs, including parent or guardian contact details gathered through the consent form below. We do not collect behavioral tracking data or sensitive personal information from minors. Portal data is limited to program management, metrics tracking and milestone evaluation.

Parental consent

Enrollment requires a parent or guardian to complete the Parental Consent, Child Safety and Media Release form. Consent for the program and consent for media use are handled as separate decisions, and declining media consent does not affect a student's participation.

Our programs are for students in grades 9 to 12 and for college students, who must be at least 18 to accept the collegiate agreement. We do not enroll children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Some of our events are free and open to the public, and a younger child may well come along with a parent - they are welcome, and we do not ask them for their details. Registration is completed by the adult or the high school student attending. If we find we have collected personal information from a child under 13 we delete it. If you believe we hold information about a child under 13, write to sharkmaker@connectit360.org and we will delete it.

What we never do with student data

Student data and concept designs are never sold, never rented, and never handed to anyone else to market to. Corporate sponsors, mentors and judges view student work through professional project dashboards only - they have no access to students' private personal data.

We do use a small number of service providers to run the program itself - to hold registrations securely and to send students and parents the details of the sessions they have signed up for. They act only on our instructions and only for our program, and we require that they never use student data for their own advertising or profiling. What we require of them, and what we have not yet put in writing, is set out under “Vendor obligations” below.

Vendor obligations

Running the program takes a small number of outside services: the company that hosts this site, the database that holds registrations, the tool that sends program email, and Stripe for payments. There is no analytics provider on that list, because there is no analytics software on this site at all - see the cookie and tracking disclosure.

We require every one of them to handle student data only on our instructions, only to run the program, and never for advertising or profiling, and we will not use a provider that will not work that way. What we have not yet done is put separate written terms about children's data in place with each of them; until we have, each provider's own standard terms are what governs, and we are not going to describe that as more than it is.

Parent and student rights

Parents and adult students may review, update, or request permanent deletion of a portal account and its data at any time, and may revoke consent to further collection. Contact sharkmaker@connectit360.org.

Safeguarding concerns

If a child is in immediate danger, call 911 first. Then tell us.

To raise a safeguarding concern with us, email sharkmaker@connectit360.org with “Safeguarding” in the subject line, or call (727) 742-7332. Both are monitored by Connect-IT 360 staff. You do not need to know who to ask for, you do not need to be certain, and you do not need to be a parent in the program. Tell us what you saw and we will take it from there.

Contact

Questions about this policy: sharkmaker@connectit360.org · (727) 742-7332 · Clearwater, Florida.

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