Running the school side of the River Tech portal

The dashboard

🔑 Admin in the nav bar. Everything below is reached from this one screen.

At the top, 📊 Overview — a count of students, teachers, parents and admins, then classes, how many pupils are actually enrolled in something, and assignments. Beside it, 📢 Send Announcement and 📧 Email Log.

Then fifteen cards:

The admin dashboard. None of the cards carries a waiting count.

Part 1 · People

Getting a family from an application to a working account is three separate steps, and the portal deliberately does not join them up.

Enrolment

📋 Enrollment. Six counters across the top — Families, Students, Pending, Approved, Denied, Waitlisted — then a filter bar (status, school year, a search that matches student name, parent name or application number) and Export CSV.

View opens the application in four tabs — Student, Family, Medical and Review. Review is where the admin notes, the buttons and the parent's typed signature live.

Approving

Two buttons, and the difference is whether the pupil can be signed in yet:

Either way the confirmation says exactly what it does:

Afterwards you get a Still to do list, and it is the most useful thing on the screen — "Milo needs their account opened", "Dana needs a parent login before they can be linked". Those two jobs are the next section.

Approve All does the same thing for every child in the family, and reports the same way — it names them in the confirmation, emails the family, and gives you one combined Still-to-do list. It approves as active; to approve a child as inactive, use their own button instead, which the confirmation reminds you of.

Deny asks for a reason in a prompt and emails it. Waitlist and Mark Under Review ask nothing at all and act immediately.

Opening accounts

Approving creates records. It creates no logins. Opening a login is a separate, deliberate act, and it is the same modal wherever you start from.

Example only — invented name and address.

The modal tells you which of three situations you are in:

• Address on record — the usual case. Check it and send.
• No usable address yet — the pupil signs in by PIN and the address on file is an internal placeholder with no inbox. Type the one they actually read.
• No address on record — nothing can be sent. Add one first.

Staff & parents

👥 Staff & Parents. Four tables — Admins, Active Teachers, Former Teachers, Parents — plus ✉️ Invite Teacher at the top. Pupils are deliberately not here; every per-pupil action lives on the student hub instead.

Inviting a teacher takes an email address and, optionally, a name. Leave the name blank and the account is created as New Teacher with a machine-generated display name, so fill it in. ✉️ Reinvite on a teacher's row sends a fresh set-password link and kills any earlier one.

On a parent's row: ➕ Link Child if they have a login, ✉️ Open account if they do not, and their linked children as removable pills.

The orphan sign-ins card

If it appears, read it. ⚠️ Sign-ins with no account lists addresses that can sign in and land on nothing, and they cannot fix it themselves — they already have a login, so registering again is refused.

Parent link requests

👪 Parent Link Requests. This is the queue a parent lands in when they do not have a link code. Each request shows who is asking, the name they typed, and either a list of possible matches or "No name match found."

Clicking a candidate asks you to confirm first, naming the parent and the child and saying what they will be able to see. A ⚠️ beside a name means that pupil is already linked to somebody, and the confirmation repeats that warning — two parents on one child is ordinary, but so is a mis-click on the wrong row of a list of siblings.

The faster route for a family is a link code, which you can read out over the phone. It is on every row of Student Records under Parent Code — click to copy. Reissuing one stops the old code working but keeps everyone already linked.

Deactivating and deleting

Almost always, deactivating is the right answer.

Delete asks twice: a full list of what goes, then a prompt where you type DELETE in capitals. Every delete that cannot be undone — a person, an enrolment, a whole class, an assignment with work handed in — uses that same two-step gate. It removes the profile, the login and every record attached — grades, attendance, notes, medical information, contacts and parent links — and unsets the teacher on any class they taught. You cannot delete yourself; your own row says "You" instead.

Part 2 · The roster

Student records

📁 Students. Search by name or email, filter by Active / Past / All and by grade. Then ➕ Add Student, Import from CSV, 👥 Find duplicates and Manage Groups.

Eight columns, and three of them are the ones you came for:

Example only — invented names and codes.

• Games PIN — shown in plain text on purpose, because pupils forget and staff have to read it back. ↻ issues a new one and kills the old one.
• Pickup — the family's pickup number. A blank here means the child cannot be called at pickup, so the gap is the point.
• Parent Code — click to copy. Reissuing keeps existing links.

Mark as Past asks for a date left and an optional reason, then tells you exactly what moved — classes archived, attending days cleared, activities ended, grades and attendance kept.

The student hub

Open on any row. A full-screen view with the pupil's GPA and quarters in the header and twelve tabs. It is the only "view one student" screen in the portal — teachers reach the same hub from 👥 My Students → 📋 View Details, so what you see is what they see, less the Account tab.

Emergency contacts live under 📁 Records. Each has a Can Pickup flag, and it is ticked by default on a new contact — untick it deliberately for anyone who may not collect the child. Marking a contact Primary clears the flag from the others automatically.

Merging duplicates

👥 Find duplicates on Student Records. This exists because staff pre-add a pupil and the pupil later signs up themselves — the records end up on one row and the login on the other.

Two ways in:

• Merge any two profiles — for the ones an exact-name match cannot spot: Ari and Arian, Sam and Samuel, a misspelling. Pick Keep this one and Remove this one.
• Exact-name groups — anywhere two profiles share a name outright.

Either way you get a live preview and then a review step. Read the warnings; they are the whole value of the tool:

The review step separates things to decide (both profiles hold a value and they disagree — you choose), settled without asking (only one has a value) and records that just combine. Then it asks once more, and says plainly that it cannot be undone.

Merge two at a time. A group of three will tell you to.

Strikes

⚠️ Student Strikes. Maximum three per pupil, and they decay after three months. Anyone at three appears in a red card at the top under 🚨 Students at Maximum Strikes (Review Required).

+ Strike opens a modal that shows current → after and escalates its wording: first strike, second strike, then "This will be their THIRD strike and they will be flagged for review." A reason is required, and parents are emailed.

Part 3 · The school

Quarters

⚙️ Settings → 📅 Grading Periods → 📅 Manage Quarters. One quarter is current; nothing works it out from today's date, so it has to be set by hand.

The current quarter decides which assignments teachers see, what the due-date picker will accept, and which grades the gradebook is showing. If a teacher says their assignments have vanished, check this first.

Subjects and grade bands

⚙️ Settings → Subjects & Grade Bands → Edit lists. This is the school's own vocabulary, and it is editable — you do not need anyone to change code to add a subject.

The second tab does the same for grade bands — the bands classes are assigned to, with the grades each one covers. Adding a band is how you split Highschool or add a Kindergarten band without anyone touching code.

The bell schedule

🔔 Bell Schedule — the time blocks that periods and breaks hang off. Classes show their times from here, so a class in a period with no block reads "no time set" to everybody.

Blocks can be reordered with the ↑ and ↓ buttons or sorted by time, and the screen warns about overlaps and out-of-order blocks. Staff duties can be tied to a block, and then they follow the bell — change the time here and the duty moves with it.

Rename, on the Every day tab, gives a block a clearer name — Period 5 (Lunch) — up to 40 characters. It renames the block on every day at once and changes only the label, never the times. Teachers see that name on the rows of their week view.

Pickup, and who is late

⚙️ Settings → 🚗 Pickup. Dismissal has always carried a real timestamp — the board shows the time each child was called, to the minute, and it keeps the first time if somebody taps twice. What this adds is the line that decides which of those times count as late.

The email arrives once, naming each child, their number, the time they were collected and how many minutes past the cutoff that was.

The board itself is 🚗 Pickup, on the Attendance screen and on every teacher's home screen. Its search runs as you type, and a family card shows only the children today's register has in, with a line to show the rest. You also get a Without a number tab, and New family number, that teachers do not.

Children who are not called at pickup

Some walk, some drive themselves, some leave with a sibling off-site. Until now the only way to say so was to leave their family number blank — and the board reads a blank number as a job not yet done, so the children who needed no chasing were exactly the ones it kept flagging.

On a pupil’s record, beside their pickup number, there is now Not called at pickup. It asks how they leave, and that reason shows on the record afterwards. An exempt child:

• stops counting towards Without a number, so that figure is only ever real gaps;
• is never named in a late email, because they cannot be late for something they are not called to;
• can still be dismissed on the board as normal — the record is unaffected.

Emergency drills

🚨 Emergency drill is on the Attendance screen and every staff home screen. Any member of staff can start one, deliberately — whoever smells smoke should not have to find the office first. It puts one shared roll call on every staff screen, and pulls anyone already in the portal onto it within about twenty seconds. The teacher guide walks through the board.

The count to watch is unaccounted for. Children due in today with no register entry are counted separately as unknown and never as accounted for, because nobody knows whether they are in the building — which is also why taking the register every morning matters.

Only an administrator sees Turn off. It shows how many are still unaccounted for and unknown, then asks "Which was this?" — It was a test, Complete — all clear, or Keep it running. There is no default; pick deliberately, because that answer is saved with the drill.

Classes

🏫 Classes — every class in the school, not just yours. Filter by teacher, and tick to include past teachers when you are looking at history. A class shows both its teachers where there are two.

Changing who teaches a class is done from here. Only staff with a working sign-in can be assigned — anyone without one is listed but not selectable, because there would be nothing to attach the class to.

Attendance and reports

📋 Attendance Reports is the school-wide view: search and filter records by date, pupil and status, and take the register from the same screen with 📋 Take Attendance.

📊 Grade Reports is by quarter and class, and is where report cards and transcripts are generated in bulk.

Everything else

Handle with care

The short list of things that either cannot be undone or do not warn you properly. Worth reading once before you need it.

Quick reference

Other guides: parents · students · teachers · all four