What to Ask Before Signing an EdTech Contract for Your School

TL;DR

• You already know how to evaluate a product. The demo is not where small schools get hurt. The contract is, and specifically the three paragraphs nobody reads: renewal, termination, and what happens to your student records on the way out.
• Ask seven questions in writing before you sign. If a vendor will answer them in a sales call but not in the agreement, you have your answer.
• The single most important clause for a school our size is termination for convenience with a short notice window. A pilot with a defined end is the version your board will approve.

I have signed these agreements as an administrator and I have written them as a founder, and the gap between the two experiences taught me something uncomfortable. Most edtech contracts are not written to describe the relationship you actually have. They are written to make the relationship hard to leave.

That is not usually malice. It is a template a startup's lawyer wrote for enterprise districts, handed unchanged to a school with 180 students. But the effect on you is the same. You sign a three-year auto-renewing agreement for a tool you will know the truth about in eleven weeks.

A separate post covers how a head of school evaluates an online curriculum vendor, which is the question before this one. This post assumes you already like the product. These are the seven questions to ask after that and before you sign.

1. Who owns the student records, and how do I get them back?

Start here, because this is the one that can cost you an accreditation visit.

The contract should say plainly that the school owns all student data and the vendor is a service provider holding it on your behalf. That language is standard, it is required by statute in several states, and a vendor who resists it is telling you something important.

Then ask the harder follow-up, which most schools skip: in what format, and how fast? "You own your data" means very little if getting it out means a PDF of screenshots six weeks after you cancel. What you need on the way out is the record that proves credit was earned. Course completions, grades, assessment results, submitted work, and enough detail to answer an accreditation reviewer who asks how a student earned half a credit in a course your school did not teach in a classroom.

Ask for three things in writing. A named export format. A turnaround time in days. And a commitment that the export stays available for some window after termination, because you will not think to pull it on the last day.

2. How does this agreement end?

There are three sub-questions here and you want all three answered.

Is there termination for convenience? That means you can leave without proving the vendor did anything wrong. Termination for cause sounds like protection, but in practice it means you must build a legal case about a product that simply was not a fit. For a school without counsel on staff, a no-fault exit with a notice period is worth more than every other protection in the document.

Does it auto-renew, and what is the notice window? Auto-renewal is not automatically bad. A 90-day notice window on a 12-month term is, because it means your decision deadline lands in February for a year that starts in August, before you have your enrollment numbers. Ask for 30 days, and put the date in your own calendar the day you sign rather than trusting yourself to remember.

What do we owe if we leave mid-term? Get the number. Not the philosophy, the number.

3. What exactly is a seat?

Vendors price in different units and the difference shows up in your budget, not in the demo.

Ask whether a seat is a student, a login, a course enrollment, or a concurrent user. Ask what happens when a student withdraws in November. Ask whether that seat can be reassigned to another student, and whether it can be reused in the spring semester by a different student, because at a small school that single answer can change your real cost by a third.

Then ask what happens if you go over. Some agreements true up at list price at the end of the year, which quietly erases the volume discount you negotiated.

4. Who is the teacher of record?

This is the question your accreditor will ask, and it is better to have the answer in the contract than to improvise it in a visit.

Any credit-bearing course delivered by an outside vendor still needs a person at your school who holds the grade, supervises the work, and signs off on the transcript entry. The vendor supplies content, instruction, and records. The vendor does not award your credit. We wrote the long version in teacher of record for AI-delivered courses, and the related question of whether the coursework satisfies your clock requirements is covered in do online electives count toward accreditation seat time.

What you want from the vendor is the supervision tooling to make that real. A dashboard that shows what each student actually did, work you can look at, and records you can hand a reviewer.

5. What happens to student data inside the product, and what does the AI do with it?

If the tool has an AI component, and in 2026 most of them do, ask three narrow questions rather than one broad one.

What student information does the system actually need? Ask for the list of data elements collected. The correct posture is minimization: if the tool can do its job without a piece of information, it should not be holding it.

Is student work used to train models? Get a yes or no in writing, and make sure the answer covers the vendor's subprocessors and not just the vendor.

Where do the conversations go? For any AI tutor, student writing is being sent somewhere and retained for some period. You are entitled to know where and how long, and to have it stated in the agreement rather than in a support article that can change.

Contracts should also prohibit selling student data, advertising to students, and building commercial profiles. That language is cheap to include and revealing to refuse.

6. What does year two cost?

Introductory pricing is normal and fine. A vendor unwilling to say what happens when it ends is not.

Ask for a cap on renewal increases, in writing, expressed as a percentage. Ask whether the price is per student per year or per student per course, because the second one grows every time a student takes a second elective. And ask whether anything in the current package moves to a paid tier later. Support, integrations, and reporting are the three that usually do.

For reference, we publish our school pricing openly at /pricing: $149 per student per year, $129 at 25 or more students, $109 at 50 or more. Founding School pricing is $99 per student for year one for the first 10 schools. You should be able to find any vendor's number with that little effort, and it is worth asking why when you cannot.

7. What happens to us if you go away?

Small schools carry real risk from vendor failure, and the polite version of this question is the financial-stability one: is the company profitable, and if not, what is the runway. Ask it. You will learn something from the answer and more from the delivery.

The contractual version is better, though. Ask what happens to your data and your students mid-year if the company is acquired, pivots, or shuts down. A thirty-day data export commitment that survives termination protects you in every one of those cases without requiring anyone to predict the future.

The four clauses to insist on

If you get nothing else, get these.

1. School owns the data, vendor is a service provider, no sale of student data and no advertising.
2. Termination for convenience with a notice period you can actually hit.
3. A named export format and turnaround, available for a defined window after the agreement ends.
4. A renewal cap stated as a percentage.

Everything else on this list is a question. Those four are terms.

How we answer these

It would be strange to write this post and then be vague about our own agreement, so: ask us all seven, in writing, and hold us to the answers.

The structural version of our answer is the pilot. One semester, one supervising teacher, a 10-student minimum, with the decision criteria set before you start. That is deliberately short enough that the exit clause barely matters, because you find out whether it works while the commitment is still small. The mechanics are in how to run an elective pilot at a small private school.

Our pricing is on the pricing page rather than behind a call. The supervising teacher at your school holds the grade and awards the credit. And if you leave, the student records are yours, which is a sentence that is only worth anything in a contract, so put it in the contract.

Frequently asked

Do we need a lawyer to review an edtech contract? For a small annual commitment, usually not. For anything multi-year, or anything where a vendor refuses the four clauses above, spend the money. One hour of review costs less than one year of an agreement you cannot exit.

Is a longer term worth a discount? Sometimes, and only if the exit is clean. A two-year term with termination for convenience at 30 days is safer than a one-year term with a 90-day notice window and an auto-renewal.

What if the vendor will not change the contract? Many startups genuinely cannot modify a standard agreement for every customer, and that is a fair answer. What is not fair is refusing to put in writing something they told you in a call. Ask for the clarification as an addendum or an email that the agreement incorporates by reference.

Who at our school should own this? One person, named, with the renewal date on their calendar. Most bad renewals at small schools are not decisions. They are calendar failures.

About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and an administrator at Rosedale Baptist School, where he runs the same elective program he sells. He built Elective Genius because his own school could not staff the courses its students wanted, and he was not willing to tell them to wait.

Start a pilot

If you want to run these questions against an actual agreement, bring ours. We will answer all seven on the call and put the answers in writing.

Start Your Pilot or book a school demo. One semester, one supervising teacher, and a defined way to say no at the end of it.