Nova LMS · Volume 01 · Spring 2026·[email protected]
Nova LMS

Cover · An introduction

The school operating system schools actually trust.

Grades. Attendance. Counseling. AI assistance. Parent transparency. Administration. One platform, one trust boundary, one team accountable for it1. The architecture decisions a school district's CISO would demand are made already — and named on the page.

  1. Built by one founder; reviewed against an eleven-attacker threat model before any pilot conversation begins.

The pages of this volume.

Chapter I

Most LMS vendors retrofitted security. We started there.

Canvas was built before FERPA had teeth. Google Classroom is one Workspace account away from being everyone's email. Every other LMS quietly assumes you will handle the hard parts. Nova does not.

i.

A tamper-evident log is the foundation of every other promise on this page.

An audit log you cannot edit2

Even an administrator account compromised by a sophisticated attacker cannot delete or modify the audit trail. Postgres Row-Level Security policies block UPDATE and DELETE on AccessLog, AIUsageLog, and GradeChangeLog. Enforced at the database layer, not the application code.

ii.

Two-factor required for staff1

Every administrator, teacher, and counselor must enroll a TOTP authenticator before accessing any student data. There is no opt-out, no remember-this-device backdoor. Middleware enforces it on every request, against every route.

iii.

Sensitive records encrypted at rest3

IEP narratives, intervention notes, discipline incidents, and nurse-visit logs are encrypted with a key kept outside the database. A leaked dump shows ciphertext only for the most sensitive records — the database administrator alone cannot read them.

iv.

No vendor admits this lives in their logs. We make it interrogable.

Every AI call is auditable4

AIUsageLog records the actor, the feature, the model, a SHA-256 hash of prompt and response, and the student ids the call referenced. When a parent asks what the AI has seen about their child, we can answer in under a minute, without retaining content.

v.

A FERPA self-service portal for parents5

Every record we hold on a child — courses, grades, attendance, IEP, discipline, nurse, the disclosure log, every AI call — visible to the linked parent and downloadable as JSON. FERPA §99.10 made one click instead of a paper request.

vi.

Backups encrypted with a key the server cannot read6

Nightly Postgres dumps are age-encrypted to a public key whose private counterpart never lives on the production host. A total host compromise cannot decrypt backups. Restore drills are run quarterly with the key holder present.

Footnotes
  1. Enforced in middleware.ts; the force-MFA branch redirects every staff account on every request until enrollment completes.
  2. Postgres RLS policies on AccessLog, AIUsageLog, GradeChangeLog. Migration 20260517223000_audit_append_only_rls.
  3. AES-256-GCM in lib/field-crypto.ts. Key supplied via env, never persisted to the database.
  4. SHA-256 prompt and response hashes stored alongside model, actor, feature, referenced student ids. See lib/ai.ts → askClaudeSafe().
  5. FERPA §99.10 self-service path at /parent/records/[studentId]; JSON export available immediately.
  6. Backups age-encrypted with a public key whose counterpart never lives on the production host. Quarterly restore drills.
Nova · 01
Chapter II

In the box.

The full inventory of what ships today. Everything below is live in production at our pilot school. Roadmap items are named separately on each role page so the line between shipped and not is unmistakable.

Teaching & learning

  • Gradebook with weighted categories
  • Assignments, rubrics, speed-grader
  • Quizzes with auto-grading
  • Discussion boards
  • Modules and lesson plans
  • AI grading, safety-clamped
  • AI authorship detection
  • Comment bank
  • Differentiated assignments

Attendance & records

  • Daily attendance per period
  • Hall passes
  • Tardy and absence patterns
  • AI pattern detection
  • CALPADS reporting
  • Excuse request workflow
  • Attendance letters
  • Bell schedule management

Counseling & wellness

  • Caseload triage, at-risk flags
  • Intervention notes, encrypted
  • Four-year academic plans
  • A-G and graduation tracking
  • Live transcripts
  • AI counselor assistant
  • Test score tracking
  • 504 / IEP accommodation registry

Parent engagement

  • Per-child overview
  • Grade-threshold alerts
  • Two-way teacher messaging
  • FERPA records portal
  • JSON data export
  • Conference scheduler (roadmap)
  • Multi-language (roadmap)
  • Notification preferences

Administration

  • User management and roles
  • Bulk roster import
  • Bulletin board
  • Audit log, tamper-evident
  • AI usage trail per student
  • Discipline and nurse records
  • Reports and CSV exports
  • School-wide data export

Built-in AI

  • AI grading assist, clamped
  • AI authorship detection
  • Lesson plan generator
  • Quiz generator
  • Rubric generator
  • Study guide generator
  • Parent email drafter
  • Counselor query assistant
  • Progress narrative generator
Nova · 02
Chapter III

The figures, plainly stated.

A school district CISO does not buy a marketing claim. They buy a number with a citation behind it. Here are ours.

Author

1of one

Founder writes every line. No contractor pool, no offshore BPO, no layoff round.

Attacker models

11profiles

Each with the mitigation enforced in code and named in the threat model.

MFA required

100%of staff

Enrollment enforced by middleware before any student data is accessible.

Logs editable

0lines

Append-only at the database layer; even root-on-host cannot rewrite history.

At rest

AES-256GCM

IEP, discipline, intervention, nurse — ciphertext on dump.

AI disclosure

≤ 1 min

From parent request to answer about what the AI has seen.

Subprocessors

3vendors

Cloudflare, Anthropic, OVH. The whole list, on the page.

Migration

≈ 4 hrs/ 100 students

From spreadsheets, Sheets, FileMaker, paper. Measured at the pilot.

Footnotes
  1. Every figure cross-references a file path or migration id in the running application; on request we walk through each one in code review with your IT counsel.
Nova · 03

Closing note

Bring Nova to your school.

We sell to one school at a time, deliberately. If you are an administrator tired of trading security for usability — or the other way around — write to us. We will send back a real document the same day, not a sales sequence.