Student / Guardian Redesign and Households

This applies to both iGradePlus products. Whether you run a district on the Enterprise SIS or keep your own classes in the free gradebook, students, guardians, and households will work the same way — the only difference is what sits above them, which the closing sections cover.

An earlier post, How Your Institution Will Be Organized in iGradePlus 12: School Systems, Campuses, Schools, and Cohorts, introduced the household model as one of the things a School System will own. This post is about that model in detail — what a guardian will be, what a household will be, and how the two will fit together.

How it works today

Guardians are recorded on the student. A student’s profile has room for up to four of them, and each one holds a name, an email address, a relationship, a marital status, home, mobile, and work phone numbers, a mailing address, and any custom guardian fields your school has defined.

It is a direct arrangement with real advantages. Everything about a student sits on one page, entering a child and their parents is a single uninterrupted task, and there is nothing to set up before you can begin. For a school whose families each have one child enrolled, it is about as short a path as there is.

Here is where today’s arrangement reaches its limits.

A parent with more than one child enrolled is recorded more than once. Because guardian details belong to the student’s profile, a mother with three children at your school is entered three times — once on each child. The three entries stand on their own, and keeping them in agreement is manual work.

A family’s address is held once per guardian entry. When a family moves, the new address is entered again for each parent on each child.

A student’s profile has room for four guardians. Families with more adults involved — a step-parent, a grandparent, a caseworker — have to be summarized to fit.

Emergency contacts and pickup authorization are handled with custom fields. Both can be tracked today by defining a custom guardian field and filling it in on each guardian entry. That records the fact, but it records it as one more detail on that single entry — not as a designation the rest of the product can act on.

A custom profile field is a label and a box. You give the field a name and say whether it belongs to the student or to a guardian; whatever is typed into it is kept as text. A field can’t be told that it holds a date, or that it must be filled in, or how long its answer may be. Profiles list their fields one after another with no way to group related ones together, and which fields count as confidential is settled for you — a fixed set that privileged staff can see and others cannot. There is also no student photo.

None of these are defects. They are the natural shape of a model built when a profile was a page of boxes and a guardian was one of a student’s attributes — which is exactly what a guardian is, right up until the moment two students share one.

What will change in iGradePlus 12

In version 12, a guardian will stop being an attribute of a student and become a record of their own, and a new record will describe the home a family shares. Both products gain the same three record types; what differs is the level that holds them:

Enterprise SIS                     Free Gradebook

School System                      Gradebook
    ├── Students                       ├── Students
    ├── Guardians   (NEW)              ├── Guardians   (NEW)
    └── Households  (NEW)              └── Households  (NEW)

Students and guardians will each be listed in their own right at that level. Households will sit alongside them, gathering the people who live together:

The Anderson Household        ← one address, one home phone
    ├── Dana Anderson       (guardian)
    ├── Chris Anderson      (guardian)
    ├── Maya Anderson       (student)
    └── Eli Anderson        (student)

Four ideas do the work here: a guardian recorded once, a link between a student and a guardian that carries the details of their relationship, a household that owns the things a family shares, and a profile whose fields are described rather than merely labelled. Let’s take them one at a time.

Guardians — a person, recorded once (new)

A Guardian will be a record of their own, listed alongside your students rather than buried inside them. Entered once, and linked to each of their children.

A guardian record will carry:

• A structured name — honorific, first, middle, last, and suffix, rather than a single line of text
• An email address
• Home, work, and mobile phone numbers
• A mailing address of their own, separate from any household they belong to
• A marital status, recorded on the guardian just as it is today
• Their own profile fields, defined once and then collected on every guardian
• An active or archived status, so a guardian whose children have all left can be set aside without being deleted
• The students they are linked to, and how they relate to each one

Two things follow from this. A parent with three children enrolled will be one record linked to three students, so a new phone number will be entered once and be right everywhere. And the four-guardian limit will go away: a student will be linked to as many guardians as that student actually has, and a guardian to as many students.

The link between a student and a guardian

Once a guardian is a person rather than a slot on a profile, the details of the relationship need somewhere to live — because they belong to the pairing, not to the adult. In version 12 they will sit on the link between the two.

Each student-and-guardian link will record:

• The relationship — mother, father, legal guardian, or whatever term fits
• Whether this guardian is the student’s primary contact
• Whether this guardian is an emergency contact for the student
• Whether this guardian is authorized to pick the student up

Keeping these on the link is what allows one adult to be described differently for different children. An uncle can be an emergency contact for his nephew without being one for his own son. A step-parent can be authorized for pickup for one child in the house and not another. The person is recorded once; how they relate to each student is recorded per student.

Households — the home a family shares (new)

A Household will represent a shared home. It will have a name, such as “The Anderson Household,” an address, a home phone, and a mobile number, and it will hold the guardians and students who live there.

Its purpose is to own the things that belong to the family rather than to any one member of it. The address is the clearest case: today it is entered per guardian per child, and in version 12 it will be entered on the household. When a family moves, the household moves, and everyone in it moves with it.

Households will also fill in what a student record leaves blank. A student who has no phone number or address of their own will show their household’s, so a class roster or an emergency call list will have something to display for every child without that information having been typed onto each one.

When a student has two homes

Not every student lives in one place, so a student will be able to belong to a primary household and a secondary one.

Each will be a full household with its own address, its own phone numbers, and its own guardians. A child of separated parents will have a home with each parent, described accurately, rather than two competing addresses recorded on the same profile with no way to say which is which. The primary household is the one that stands in for the student’s own contact details; the secondary is a real second home rather than an afterthought.

What households will make possible

Grouping people by the home they share is not an end in itself. It is what lets iGradePlus treat a family as a family:

• One address to maintain, updated in one place when a family moves
• Billing against a household, when several children are paid for by the same adults
• Pickup and emergency arrangements that survive a split, because each home is described in its own right

Profiles that describe what you collect

Students and guardians both carry a profile — the set of fields your institution has decided to keep about them. In version 12 a profile field will stop being a labelled box and become something described: it will have a type, its own rules, its own audience, and a place in the profile.

Every field will have a type

Rather than one kind of field that holds text, you will say what a field is for:

• Text, on a single line or several
• Numbers and dates
• Phone numbers, email addresses, and web addresses
• A fixed list of options to choose one from — or several
• A list you can add to, for options that aren’t all known in advance
• A file, or a collection of files

Each field will carry its own rules alongside its type: whether it is required, what default value a new record starts with, and how long an entry may be. A field you have stopped collecting will be able to be retired rather than deleted, so the answers already recorded in it aren’t lost.

Each field will have its own audience

Today a field is either confidential or it is not, that choice is made for you, and staff either have the privilege to see confidential fields or they do not. In version 12 the choice will be yours, field by field, and it will be made separately for the three kinds of people who might read it:

• Staff — every staff member, administrators only, confidential, or a named list of people who need to know
• The student — hidden from them, visible to them, or editable by them
• Guardians — hidden, visible to the primary guardian only, or visible to every linked guardian, with a separate choice for which of them may edit it

That is what makes it reasonable to keep sensitive details on the profile itself. A health note can be confidential while the emergency phone number beside it stays visible to every teacher.

Families will be able to keep their own details current

The corrections a profile needs most often — a new mobile number, a change of address, a parent’s new email — are known first by the family. Today a student or guardian signing in can see the profile but not change it, so those corrections reach you as an email or a note for someone to type in, and the record is only as current as the last time somebody got around to it.

In version 12, the people who know will be able to enter the change themselves. Where you have made a field editable by a student or a guardian, there will be two ways that can work, chosen field by field:

• Direct updates — the change takes effect as soon as it is made. Suited to the fields where the family is simply the better source.
• Requested updates — the change is submitted for review, and takes effect once a staff member approves it. Suited to anything you would want to see before it reaches the record.

Fields you haven’t opened up are unaffected. They stay visible or hidden according to the audience you set, and editable only by staff.

Fields will be organized into groups

Profiles will be divided into named groups rather than presented as one long list, with both the groups and the fields inside them in an order you set. The groups will be yours to define; version 12 will simply arrive with a useful set already built for students:

• Personal Info — name, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, languages, country of birth, citizenship
• Contact Information — email, phone numbers, and address
• Enrollment — enrollment and withdrawal dates, status, previous school, expected graduation year
• Medical / Health — conditions, allergies, medications, doctor, insurance, blood type
• Special Programs — IEP status, 504 plan, ELL/ESL, gifted and talented, free and reduced lunch, accommodations
• Transportation — travel mode, bus route, pickup and dropoff addresses

That set is a starting point, not the limit. Groups can be renamed, reordered, and removed, and you will be able to create your own for whatever your institution tracks that the built-in groups don’t cover — athletics, boarding, work placements — each holding its own fields, and each of those fields carrying the type and audience you give it.

Medical / Health and Special Programs will be confidential from the start — a sensible default you can change, rather than a decision you have to remember to make.

A photo on the student profile

Student profiles will gain an optional photo, kept in Personal Info alongside the rest of a student’s identifying details.

Where these records will live

Everything above is the same in both iGradePlus products. What differs is the level that holds the records, and how far “recorded once” reaches.

In the free gradebook

Your gradebook is the top of the structure, and it will hold your students, your guardians, and your households. A parent with two of your students in different classes will be one guardian entry, and the family in one household — where today they are entered separately on each child. There is no layer above the gradebook, so there is nothing to inherit and nothing to share with anyone else: the people in your gradebook are yours.

In the Enterprise SIS

The School System holds them, rather than any individual school — which matters most for institutions that run more than one. A student will join a school through a membership and can hold more than one, each with its own status.

The result is that a family with a child in the middle school and another in the high school will be one household with two students, rather than two unrelated families that happen to share a surname. Guardians follow the same rule: one entry per person, however many of your schools their children attend.

Side by side

	Today	In iGradePlus 12
Where a guardian is recorded	On each student’s profile	As a record of their own, listed alongside students
A parent with three children enrolled	Entered three times, once per child	Entered once, linked to all three
Guardians per student	Up to four	As many as the student has
Updating a parent’s phone number	Updated on each child’s profile	Updated once, on the guardian
A family’s address	Entered per guardian, per child	Held on the household
Emergency contact and pickup	Recorded with custom guardian fields	A designation on each student-and-guardian link
A student with two homes	One address per guardian entry	A primary and a secondary household, each complete
A custom profile field	A name, and a box that holds text	A type, its own rules, and its own audience
Which fields are confidential	A fixed set, decided for you	Your choice, field by field, per staff, student, and guardian
Profile layout	One continuous list of fields	Named groups you define, in the order you want them
Student photo	Not available	An optional photo in Personal Info
A family’s own corrections	Sent to the office to be typed in	Entered by them — directly, or as a request staff approve

What this will mean for you

• If you teach your own classes on the free gradebook, you get the same model the districts get. Siblings across two of your classes will share one parent entry and one household, and you will be able to record who to call first and who may collect a child — without any of the structure above the gradebook that you have no use for.
• If your families mostly have one child enrolled, the day-to-day will feel much as it does now — one child, one set of parents, one address. What you gain is the ability to say who to call first and who may collect a child, and one place to correct a phone number.
• If you have a lot of siblings enrolled, this is the change that removes the duplicate entry. One parent, one record, one update — however many children they have with you.
• If you work with separated or blended families, primary and secondary households will let you describe two real homes, and the pickup and emergency-contact designations will apply per child, rather than being one more field to fill in on every guardian entry.
• If you collect anything sensitive — health details, program status, anything a parent would expect discretion about — you will be able to say who sees each field rather than accepting a single confidential-or-not distinction, and the groups that hold that information will start out confidential.
• If keeping contact details current is a running battle, the families themselves will be able to fix what they know is wrong — on the fields you choose, and either directly or as a change you approve first.
• If you run several schools or a district, students and guardians will be held once for the whole School System, so a family with children at two of your schools will be recognizably one family.