Terms of Service

Aligned Practice

Last updated: 16 September 2026

Effective: 16 September 2026

1. Who you are agreeing with

Aligned Practice is operated by Nicole Poncia SLP LLC, a Pennsylvania limited liability company doing business as The Child-Led Therapy Center ("we", "us", "our"). You can reach us at hello@childled.org.

These Terms are a contract between us and you, the person using the software ("you"). If you are using Aligned Practice on behalf of a school, district, agency or practice, you confirm you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" means both you and that organization.

By creating an account or using Aligned Practice, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use it.

2. What Aligned Practice is, and what it is not

Aligned Practice is a documentation tool. It helps speech-language pathologists and related professionals write rubric-based goals, record scores against them, and produce progress reports and printed materials from what they recorded.

It is a professional's tool, not a clinical authority. Specifically:

It does not give clinical advice. Every piece of wording it offers is a starting point for you to edit. The goal bank, the rubric levels, the narrative summaries and the questionnaire prompts are drafting aids. You are the clinician. Every clinical judgment, every goal that goes into an IEP, and every statement in a report you send is yours.

It does not make eligibility, placement or dismissal decisions, and nothing it produces should be treated as making one. It calculates arithmetic from scores you entered and writes sentences from templates. It does not know the child.

It is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition.

It has one optional feature that uses artificial intelligence, and it is the only one. The rubric writing coach, on the Goal writer screen, sends what you type into it to a language model run by Anthropic and returns draft wording for you to edit. You have to open it and use it deliberately. Nothing happens automatically, nothing else in the app calls it, and you never have to touch it.

Everything else is still templates and arithmetic. Every progress report, every narrative summary, every printed document and every calculated score is assembled from fixed templates and the numbers you entered, exactly as before. No document this software produces for a child's file is written by a language model unless you personally used the coach to draft that wording and chose to keep it.

What the coach sends, and what it never sends. It sends the words you type into it: your description of how the child communicates, your wording for the four levels, and anything you add about partners, the environment or regulation. It also sends which skills and which scoring lens you picked. It does not send, and cannot reach, your student codes, student names, settings, scores, dates, goals, reports, or anything else in your database. It is asked to write wording, and the only material it is given is the wording you typed. Section 6 covers what that means for information about a child. The short version is: do not type a name into it, and the screen says so at the point where you would.

It is a drafting aid and you are still the author. Language models get things wrong, sometimes confidently. Every word the coach produces is a first draft for you to read, edit and take responsibility for, exactly like every other piece of wording this software offers. Do not put anything into an IEP that you have not read and judged yourself.

A correction, and an apology for it. Until 16 September 2026 this section said that Aligned Practice did not use artificial intelligence at all, and that we would tell you before that changed. The coach was switched on during the beta before these Terms were updated, so that promise was not kept in the right order. The description above is accurate as of the date at the top of this page. No progress report or printed document produced before then was written by a language model. We are telling every beta member directly rather than leaving this to be found here.

It is not your system of record. Your employer's IEP system is. Aligned Practice is where you do the work before it goes there. Keep your own copies of anything you rely on. Section 12 explains how to export everything.

3. Who may use it

You must be at least 18 years old and a practicing professional, a student in a relevant program, or someone otherwise authorised by us.

Aligned Practice is not directed to children and we do not knowingly permit anyone under 18 to hold an account. Children do not use this software. Information about children reaches it only because a professional entered it, which is what Section 6 is about.

4. Your account

You are responsible for your account and everything done with it. Use a password you do not use anywhere else. Turn on two-factor authentication, which is available in My library and takes about a minute. Tell us at hello@childled.org promptly if you believe someone else has access.

Accounts are for one person. Do not share your login. If more than one clinician at your site needs access, each of them needs their own account, because the record of who entered what is only meaningful if it is true.

We may suspend or close an account that is being shared, that is being used in a way that breaks these Terms, or that is putting other people's information at risk.

5. Subscriptions, billing and the beta

During the beta. While Aligned Practice is in beta, access is provided free or at a reduced rate, as agreed with you individually. Beta means what it sounds like. Features will change, some things will break, and we may reset or restructure data if we have to. We will warn you before doing anything destructive and you can export everything at any time. Do not use the beta as the only copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

After the beta. Subscriptions renew automatically at the interval you chose until canceled. Prices are shown at the point of purchase. You can cancel at any time from your account or by emailing us, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for.

Refunds. You can have a full refund within 14 days of your first payment, for any reason, by emailing us. Renewal payments are not refundable, but you can cancel at any time before a renewal date and you will not be charged again.

Price changes. We will give at least 30 days' notice before a price change affects you, by email to your account address.

Payment processing. Payments are handled by a third-party processor. We do not receive or store your full card number.

6. Student information, and what you are promising us

This is the most important section in this document. Please read it properly.

Aligned Practice lets you enter information about the children you work with. What you enter is up to you. By default, students are identified by a code you choose. Student names are switched off, and turning them on is a deliberate act in your settings.

When you enter information about a student, you promise us all of the following:

a. You are authorised to do so. Either you are employed or contracted by the school, district or agency responsible for that child's records, and using Aligned Practice falls within your role, or you have the direct written permission of the child's parent or guardian.

b. Doing so does not break your employer's policies, your contracts, or any agreement your employer has with you about where student information may be stored. If you do not know your employer's rules on this, find out before you enter anything. This is not a rhetorical suggestion. Many districts have a list of approved software, and a tool being useful is not the same as it being approved.

c. Any consent or notice that the law requires has been obtained or given. Under FERPA, the usual route for a service like this is your school or district designating us a school official with a legitimate educational interest, under a written agreement. We have a Student Data Privacy Agreement ready to sign. Ask us for it and we will send it to your director the same day.

d. You will enter the minimum you actually need. Aligned Practice does not ask for dates of birth, addresses, identification numbers, medical records or diagnoses, and you should not put them into free-text fields either.

e. You will not enter anything identifying a child into the Community area. Not in a post, not in a reply, not in a shared skill. This is absolute. Section 8 covers it.

What we do with it. We store it, we show it back to you, and we do what the software does with it. We do not sell it. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use it to train any machine learning model, ours or anyone else's. We do not look at it except when you ask us to help with a problem and we need to, or when we are legally compelled, or when we must to protect someone's safety.

Who holds the responsibility. Where you are acting for a school or district, that organization is the one responsible for the student information under FERPA and equivalent state law. We handle it on their behalf and on yours. We follow your instructions about it. We do not decide independently what to do with it. If your district signs an agreement with us and that agreement conflicts with these Terms about student data, the agreement wins.

If you get this wrong, and you have entered information you were not permitted to enter, tell us at hello@childled.org and we will help you remove it.

7. Your content, and who owns what

What you write stays yours. The goals you build, the rubric wording you author, the scores, the notes, the student records. All yours. We claim no ownership of any of it.

You give us the limited permission we need to actually run the service: to store your content, back it up, transmit it to you, and display it back to you. That permission exists so the software can function, it lasts as long as your account does, and it is for nothing else.

What is ours. The Aligned Rubric Framework, the goal bank and its skill wording, the four-point scale and its lenses, the questionnaire, the report templates, the name, the logo, the site design and the code. These are ours and are protected by copyright and other laws.

Your subscription is a license to use these things in your own professional practice, including in documents you produce for the children on your caseload and for their teams. It does not let you republish the goal bank, resell it, put it in your own product, use it to build a competing tool, or train a machine learning model on it. If you would like to use any of it in teaching or in a publication, ask us. The answer is often yes.

Materials you print. Documents you produce carry Aligned Practice branding by default, and you can turn that off in your settings for anything going into a school system. Once you have removed the branding, the document is just your document.

8. The Community

The Community area, which includes the shared goal bank and the discussion board, is the one place where what you write is read by other subscribers. Different rules apply there.

Nothing identifying a child. Ever. No name, no initials, no school name, no student identification number, no combination of details that would let somebody work out who you mean. Describe the situation, not the child. The software warns you when what you have typed looks like it might contain a name, but that warning is a courtesy and not a filter. The obligation is yours.

Be a colleague. No harassment, no abuse, no discrimination, no attacks on a person's practice or identity. Disagree with the idea.

Do not use it as a marketplace. No advertising, no recruiting, no promoting your own products or services without asking us first.

Do not post other people's copyrighted material, including assessment protocols, test items, published rubrics, or material from other paid programs.

Sharing a skill means sharing it. When you publish a skill or rubric wording to the shared goal bank, you are giving every other subscriber, and us, a permanent, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, edit and build on that wording, including in future versions of the built-in goal bank. You keep your rights in it. You are simply not able to take it back from the people who copied it. Do not share wording you are not free to give away, and do not share anything a previous employer or another company would say belongs to them.

Moderation. We can remove anything, hide anything, and close any account, at our discretion, with or without notice. Anything reported as identifying a child gets dealt with first. We are not obliged to monitor the Community, and we do not review posts before they appear.

What other people post is theirs, not ours. Opinions in the Community are the opinions of the people who wrote them. We do not endorse them and we do not check whether they are correct. Wording you copy from another member is wording you are responsible for reviewing before it goes near an IEP.

9. Things you may not do

Do not attempt to access another account or another person's data. Do not probe, scan or test the security of the service, or work around any limit or access control. Do not scrape it, copy it in bulk, or use automated tools against it. Do not resell or sublicence access. Do not upload malicious code. Do not use it to break any law, or in any way that would put student information at risk.

10. Availability, changes and support

We aim to keep Aligned Practice running and available, and we do not promise any particular level of uptime. It may be unavailable for maintenance, for reasons outside our control, or because something has broken.

We will keep changing the software. Features will be added, altered and sometimes removed. If we remove something you depend on, we will tell you by email before we do it and give you a way to get your data out.

Support is by email at hello@childled.org. We aim to reply within two business days.

11. Ending it

You can leave whenever you like. Cancel from your account or email us. Export your data first, because Section 12 explains what happens next.

We can end it too, if you break these Terms, if your payment fails and stays failed, if your use puts other people's information at risk, or on 30 days' notice for any other reason. If we end your subscription without cause, we will refund the unused part of what you have paid.

12. Getting your data out, and getting it deleted

Export. At any time, from My library, you can download everything your account holds. You get a complete JSON file and a CSV of scores. Student names are left out unless you tick the box asking for them.

Deleting a student. Inside any student's record there is a delete button that removes that student, every goal, every score, every note and every saved report attached to them. It is immediate and it cannot be undone.

Deleting your account. Email hello@childled.org from your account address and ask. We will delete your account and everything in it within 30 days and confirm when it is done. We are building a button that does this without needing to email us, and this section will be updated when it exists.

After your subscription ends. Your data stays available to export for 60 days. After that we may delete it. Back up anything you need before then.

Backups. Deleted data can persist in encrypted backups for a short period after deletion, and those backups are overwritten on a rolling schedule.

13. Disclaimers

Aligned Practice is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components, that any defect will be corrected, or that anything it produces will be accurate, complete, or appropriate for a particular child.

You remain the professional. Nothing Aligned Practice produces is a substitute for your clinical judgment, your professional obligations, your licensing body's requirements, or your employer's policies. Read what it produces before you use it.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither we nor anyone working with us will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost goodwill, or business interruption, whether or not we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to Aligned Practice will not exceed the greater of one hundred United States dollars, or the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, the exclusions and limitations above apply to you only as far as your state's law permits, and nothing here limits liability for our own fraud, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited.

15. You cover us for what you put in

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Nicole Poncia SLP LLC and its members, officers and contractors from any claim, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of your use of Aligned Practice, your breach of these Terms, your breach of the promises in Section 6 about student information, anything you post in the Community, or your violation of any law or of anyone's rights.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Before filing anything, please email hello@childled.org and give us 30 days to sort it out. Most things are a misunderstanding and can be fixed in a week.

If that does not work, any dispute will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and we both consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.

A note on arbitration. These Terms deliberately contain no binding arbitration clause and no class action waiver. Many software terms include both. They meaningfully limit what a customer can do to you, they have to be presented in a particular way to be enforceable, and Pennsylvania courts scrutinise how they were agreed to. That is a decision to make with an attorney rather than a paragraph to copy, so it has been left out rather than guessed at. Nothing here prevents one being added later.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. If a change materially affects your rights, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Aligned Practice after that means you accept the new version. If you do not accept it, cancel, and we will refund the unused part of your subscription.

The date at the top always tells you which version you are reading.

18. The remaining legal furniture

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any Student Data Privacy Agreement we have signed with your organization, are the whole agreement between us about Aligned Practice.

Order of precedence. If a signed Student Data Privacy Agreement conflicts with these Terms on the subject of student data, the signed agreement governs.

Severability. If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours in connection with a sale or reorganization of the business, and we will tell you if that happens.

Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for failing to perform because of something genuinely outside our reasonable control.

Questions about any of this: hello@childled.org