Safety
Safety built into the rules, not bolted on later.
Homeroom is not a school-security company, and we will not pretend to be one. What we do is make the system itself safe by construction: a child can only be reached in an emergency, sensitive records are hidden by default, the content filter never shows a minor the words it blocks, and our AI runs on our own system — nothing is sent to an outside AI company. Here is exactly what that means — and what we leave to the specialists.
This page lists only what is shipped today, plus an honest list of what we do not yet offer.
Safe because of how it is built
Emergencies only, by construction
There is no marketing or fundraising call lane in the system, so a non-emergency call cannot be sent — it is refused. When the emergency calling channel is turned on, a call reaches only a student’s permitted guardian-of-record contacts. Emergency-only scope shipped
Content moderation, blocked by default
Submitted images and text are checked, and the content-filter word list stays on the server — a minor never sees the words being filtered. If the check ever hiccups, it blocks by default rather than letting something through. Shipped
AI that runs on our own system
Homeroom is built so that when AI runs, it runs on our own computers — nothing is sent to an outside AI company. By design the AI hides personal information before processing, filters its own output, and refuses to create images of people; any data it derives stays inside our own system and is kept only for a defined retention window. These AI features turn on as our own in-house models come online. Our in-house AI is coming
No alert fires twice
A re-mark or a re-send never notifies the same guardian twice — a safety property built into the system, not a habit staff have to remember. Shipped
Every safety record, chained and checkable
Each write to a safety record is hashed into a running SHA-256 (a cryptographic fingerprint) chain, so the ledger is tamper-evident rather than merely logged — anyone can replay the chain end to end and see whether a single entry was altered after the fact. This is a property of the record store itself, not a promise about staff behavior. A district that only has a mutable database cannot make this claim about its own records. Shipped
An anonymous tip line, with a wall around conflicts of interest
A tip can be filed with no reporter identity captured at all — not a masked field that support staff can still trace back, an absence. And if a tip names a staff member, that staff member is automatically walled out of reading or triaging it: the system enforces the recusal, so no one has to remember to step aside. Shipped
Extra care where it matters most
Some records need more than ordinary privacy. Self-harm, harassment, and law-enforcement incidents are hidden from lists and shown only to an administrator, one record at a time. For any hidden student, the incident narrative, the student name, and referral notes are removed by default. This is the same permission and privacy spine the rest of the platform runs on — not a separate, bolt-on policy. Shipped
One platform, one roster
A safety record does not live in a second system that has to be kept in sync with your roster overnight. The student, the guardian-of-record contacts, and the custody information a safety record touches are the same identity and the same custody record the rest of Homeroom uses — one roster, not a bolt-on that imports a copy of it. The same permission rules (FERPA (the federal student-privacy law) and COPPA (the federal child-privacy law) protections, row-level access scoping, minor-subject redaction on list views) apply everywhere a safety record appears, by construction, not by a second policy someone has to maintain. Shipped
What we leave to the specialists — for now
We are honest about the school-safety tools we do not fully offer, naming the exact seam rather than a blanket absence. Visitor management is not something Homeroom does today; if a visitor check is ever added, it will only ever compare a name against a school’s own watchlist — never a live feed against a national sex-offender registry — so nothing here should be read as national offender screening. A panic alert can be recorded and routed to your own responder list, but the hardware (wearables, duress badges) and the 911/PSAP/RapidSOS dispatch that a dedicated security vendor provides are not part of Homeroom; wiring a route through to a 911 dispatch center is a partner integration we have not configured. Reunification — releasing a student only to an authorized guardian — is a concept we are building toward, and the e-sign step that finalizes a release is not live yet. We also do not have a volunteer or staff background-check module of any kind. Device and web content filtering on student laptops, and always-on monitoring of student accounts for self-harm, are not offered either. Those are real, important jobs, and several of them belong to dedicated safety vendors built for exactly them; we will not imply otherwise. The emergency phone-call channel that does exist is in early access: it turns on only once a per-school calling key is set up, so Homeroom does not place live emergency calls on its own today. Emergency calling channel in early access
We’re honest about what’s shipped
The emergency-only message scope, content moderation blocked by default, no-double-notify alerts, extra-care hiding of sensitive incidents, the hash-chained tamper-evident audit ledger, the anonymous tip line with automatic conflict-of-interest recusal, and the single-platform roster and custody model are live today. The emergency calling channel is in early access, turning on with a per-school calling key. Our own in-house AI — built to keep student data inside our own system with a defined retention window — is coming. Full visitor management beyond a name-vs-our-own-watchlist check, panic-button hardware and 911/PSAP/RapidSOS dispatch, the reunification e-sign step, device filtering, a volunteer background-check module, and account monitoring are not offered — and we tell you plainly rather than pretend.