Effective Date / Original Inception: April 1st, 2022.
Updates Can Be Located in The Bottom-Most ‘Updates & Revisions’ Section
Who we are
The Tri-State German-American School Society operates as The Tri-State German-American School and is often abbreviated as TSGAS. All three terms should be considered interchangeable throughout the context of this web site and Privacy Policy document. TSGAS is a non-profit, non-discriminatory, tax-exempt organization in operation since 1968. The organization was formed with and continues the mission of providing German language instruction and cultural enrichment to children, teens, and adults in a relaxed atmosphere. The Board of Trustees structure, membership roles, and the codes / articles explaining oversight and administration of the organization can be located in the By-Laws document, accessible via an adjacent link on the parent of this Privacy Policy page.
Our website address is: https://tri-stategermanschool.org
Our contact information
General inquiries can be sent via our contact form and will be answered by school administration as timely as administratively possible. This is our preferable method of contact, and the form can be conveniently found as a top-level main menu item.
Alternatively, an email address and phone number for directly contacting a member of school administration can be located on the left side of the top-most menu of this website.
Additionally, direct contact phone numbers for several members of school administration, along with their roles, are also located on the Faculty/Staff page, accessible from the School Info drop-down menu. Our mailing address is:
Tri-State German-American School Society of Cincinnati
P.O. Box 20161
Cincinnati, OH 45220
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
The Tri-State German-American School Society takes the privacy of its students ... current, former, and prospective alike; as well as that of all site visitors and other associated parties with the utmost seriousness and respect. We aim to solicit and maintain only the minimal personally identifiable information required for student enrollment, required recordkeeping, marketing, and general operations of the school. All data collected is for internal use and not for sale nor release to any third parties. The data retention times are discussed further along in this document. Although payment options exist through the 3rd party PayPal interface which allows secure transactions on their web site, including credit card payments, under no circumstances will the school request/maintain highly sensitive information such as social security numbers, bank information, or credit card data directly via this web site.
Contact forms
A primary contact form exists for prospective students, current students, and web site visitors to ask questions related to the school in general or in reference to their specific situation. Name, email address, and phone number information is requested by the form purposely for school administration to provide a response to the inquiry.
Enrollment forms
Enrollment forms exist for new and returning students to register for classes each year. Student names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers, and other personally identifiable information is routinely collected alongside class selections, in order to maintain school records and manage classroom and instructor assignments. At the present time (as of January 1st, 2022), we only accept tuition payments by check/money order or via our 3rd party PayPal secure integration service.
Donations / Donation forms
As a non-profit organization providing valuable and affordable language learning to the school's geographic footprint, we may periodically enact fundraisers and always amicably welcome charitable contributions which are used to enhance the operation of the school. The donation forms request names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers and other personally identifiable information typically collected by non-profit organizations for proper recordkeeping. At the present time only an offline method via check/money order is allowable to facilitate donations.
Product sales / Order forms
As a non-profit organization providing valuable and affordable language learning to the school's geographic footprint, in the future, we may operate a store that sells textbooks and items of nominal value such as apparel and goods embossed with the school's logo. Any revenue from the sales goes directly to enhancing the operation of the school. The product order forms may request names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers and other personally identifiable which is typically collected for processing orders and for proper recordkeeping. The products are maintained by and under local control of the school. At the present time, only a placeholder exists on the Store page.
Additional forms
At our discretion, additional forms may periodically exist on this web site in either temporary or persistent state. As examples, forms to request subscription of school publications, scholarship applications, survey forms, online class assignments, or ad-hoc forms built for specific events may be enacted. As with the aforementioned four constant forms, any additional forms soliciting personally identifiable information will be treated in the same manner, with the data solely for internal use by the school, and not for sale nor release to any third parties.
Web site registration
Although site registration is only available to school administration, faculty, and board members at the present time (as of January 1st, 2022), at some point in the future, the Tri-State German-American School may require registration to this site for all students enrolling or wishing to maintain enrollment at TSGAS, for visitors to view certain content, or for visitors to interact with certain components of the web site. Upon onset of this policy, limited personally identifiable information such as name, username, and email address will be maintained by TSGAS and our content platform to authenticate valid users. Personal passwords required for logon will be manageable by the user, albeit required to meet certain levels of strength and security aspects. TSGAS reserves the right to revoke web site access to any user found not following proper security protocol. We utilize various applications and methods to detect and defeat attempts to circumvent our access and security protocols; and will work diligently with our technical partners and law enforcement when any attempt to do so is detected.
Analytics
The Tri-State German-American School Society does routinely employ analytics to facilitate our marketing and operational activities. In some areas of the web site, such as the enrollment forms, we request addresses and other demographic information that allows us to understand the make-up of our current and prospective student body and to continually improve our marketing and operational capabilities to better serve our student population. This information is often aggregated to view trends and summary reporting to the school board. Both the aggregated and individually identifiable information is maintained for internal use by the school only and will not be sold nor provided to any third parties.
Comments
In some instances, posts and other sections of this web site may solicit or be open for comments and feedback. When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select "Remember Me", your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g., videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we share your data with
The Tri-State German-American School Society will not share your personal data with any entity external to the school unless under an unlikely and unexpected authorized court order, request by law enforcement, or other legitimate legal decree. As with most web sites, we employ third party web hosting services, the Word Press content management environment, and the utilization of software plugins and other vetted technical applications to power its functionality. We use all reasonable and customary techniques to avoid sharing our core content with these entities. To accommodate convenient payment methods, we do use a 3rd party PayPal interface to obtain payment information, which may include credit card transactions. PayPal is an established well-known, secure payment processing provider. All secure transactions are performed via their applications and not directly on the TSGAS site.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Additional information
How we protect your data
We operate a secure web site with an authentication certificate (noted by the https:// designation) provided by our web-hosting service, iPage. In addition to the security controls inherent to our web hosting provider and Word Press content management environment, we employ various access control management and security applications and methods, including but not limited to, those which alert administration to any unauthorized attempts at entry, code, or content changes and blunt such attempts; those which require administrative activation of new users; those which provide differentiated multi-layered role permissions, and those which facilitate strong password requirements. The web site is managed in order to facilitate secure backups and continually update to the most recent versions and security features of Word Press, the mySQL database, PHP and other scripting, files, forms, and front-end GUIs.
Although in today's world, with highly skilled bad actors performing sophisticated hacks and attacks on even the most secure institutions, it is nearly impossible to guarantee against ever having a breech, all reasonable attempts to harden and review our access control and security methods are continually undertaken. We aim to work diligently with our technical partners to detect and defeat any attempts at circumventing our access and security protocols and to alert law enforcement if any attempt to do so is discovered.
What third parties we receive data from
What data breach procedures we have in place
If the Tri-State German-American School Society self-determines, is notified by our web hosting provider, or learns by any other source of a breach, we will:
Attempt to notify all impacted parties via email of the breach, its scope, and any other pertinent information that we are allowed by law to disclose.
Cooperate with our technical partners, law enforcement, and any other relevant parties to mitigate the impact of the breech.
Pass along any recommendations we may have or are made by our technical partners or law enforcement as reasonable steps to mitigate impact of the breech (i.e.: changing passwords, etc.)
Take actions under our control to mitigate persistence of the breech (i.e.: change administrator passwords, refresh software modules, etc.)
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
No automated decision making nor profiling is currently in effect nor planned by the Tri-State German-American School Society. As an organization which upholds our non-discriminatory policy, we take pride in the personal relationships and interactions handled professionally, respectfully, and with great acumen by the TSGAS faculty and staff. Decisioning, for example such as that of scholarship selections, is scrutinized and performed in person by the authorized faculty / board members. Recordkeeping, aggregation of data, and analysis / reporting of such data is also performed manually and reviewed in person by authorized TSGAS staff.
