How we decide what you see.

SchoolBoardNews is non-partisan. We point readers to reporting about public schools and school boards, and we try to make that reporting easier to find and understand without deciding for anyone what to think about it. These are the rules we hold ourselves to. Writing them down means anyone can check our work against them.

What we carry, and what we don't

• We link to reporting by local and national publishers. We don't write news stories of our own, and every story leads with a link to the original article.
• We don't endorse candidates or ballot measures, and we don't take sides on the issues boards decide.
• We don't score outlets for bias or credibility, and we don't fact-check publishers. When a publisher corrects its own story, its article is the record.
• We don't monitor or moderate how readers discuss stories elsewhere. In our own comment sections, editors can hide a comment but never edit what someone wrote.

How we choose sources

Any outlet that reports on K–12 public education can appear here: local newspapers and TV stations, public media, statewide and national newsrooms, and education trade press. Including an outlet isn't an endorsement of it, and we don't leave outlets out for their point of view. We do leave out pages with no reporting of their own, such as bare candidate profiles, event listings and press releases presented as news. Suggest a source.

How the feed is ordered

Newest first, by when the publisher published. We never rank stories by clicks, shares, reactions or how outraged they make people. When several outlets report the same event, we show it once and list every outlet that covered it. What you see is shaped only by the topics and places you choose to follow; we never infer anyone's politics.

What waits for an editor

Most stories are checked and published automatically. A story is held for a person to decide when it is sensitive: it names or describes a student or another minor, alleges a crime, abuse or misconduct by someone identifiable, covers a death, suicide, self-harm or a violent incident, or is a lawsuit against a named person. Holding a story isn't suppressing it. An editor reads it and decides.

Once a sensitive story is published, we keep our own footprint around it small:

• no AI summary, and no photo from the article;
• it stays out of our newsletters, the audio briefing, data exports and “Ask about my district” answers.

Public figures and private people

School board members, superintendents and other senior district leaders hold public roles, and reporting about how they carry them out belongs here. Students, teachers, coaches, other staff and parents did not choose public life. We never name a student in anything we write ourselves, including summaries, topic pages and newsletters, and we let readers follow districts, states and topics, never individual people.

If a story here names you and you'd like us to stop showing it, email editors@schoolboardnews.app with the story link. We weigh the public's interest in the reporting against the harm to you. We are more likely to act when you are a private person, when you were a minor at the time, when the story is several years old, or when an allegation was later dropped or disproved. We don't change the publisher's article; it's theirs.

How we use AI

AI models help us sort stories by topic and place, spot repeats and sensitive stories, and write short summaries in our own words where publishers allow it. Summaries are always labeled and can contain errors, so the original article stays one tap away. More on how stories get here and on publishers' choices.

Corrections

When we get something wrong in what we show (a location, a topic, an outlet, a link, or a detail in a summary), we fix it and add a dated note to the story so the change is visible. Every note is listed in our public corrections log. We use three kinds:

• Correction. Something we showed was wrong (a location, topic, outlet, link or summary detail).
• Clarification. What we showed was accurate but could be misread, so we added context.
• Update. Later events changed the picture, for example an outcome or a publisher's own correction.

To tell us about a problem, choose Report an issue on the story, or email editors@schoolboardnews.app.

Conflicts of interest

SchoolBoardNews's founder serves on a school board in Washington state. To keep that from shaping coverage:

• stories about her district go through the same automatic checks and rules as every other district's;
• she doesn't hold, unpublish, edit or add context to stories about her own district or board, and anything held about it waits for another editor;
• sponsorships and job listings tied to that district get a separate conflict check before anything is approved.

We'll update this section whenever an editor's role creates a conflict.

Advertising and sponsors

Sponsors can't buy coverage, change it, or see who reads it. Every sponsor message is labeled “Sponsored” with the sponsor's name, carries no tracking scripts, and never appears inside a story. See sponsoring SchoolBoardNews.