Administrator setup

How a school gets set up

The order is fixed and it is worth knowing, because most questions in the first week are really questions about which step has not happened yet.

1. The school or district buys a license.
2. Skhillz Academy provisions the school: it is created, its seat count is set, and its license dates are recorded. You do not do this step.
3. Your first administrator is added by us, with the email address you give.
4. That administrator accepts the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum.
5. That administrator adds the teaching staff themselves.
6. Teachers create classes and import their rosters.
7. Students sign in with their codes.

Steps 4 to 7 are yours. If you are stuck before that, email support@skhillzacademy.org rather than looking for a button.

Accepting the School Data Addendum

Nothing can happen until this is done. No student can be created for a school that has not accepted the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum, so a teacher who tries to import a roster first will be stopped with:

Before adding students, an administrator must accept the School Data
Privacy and FERPA Addendum.

It takes about ten seconds. Open your school and a banner sits at the top of the screen. Type your name and, if you like, your role, then press Accept on behalf of the school. The banner disappears and rosters work immediately.

Three things worth knowing:

• Only an administrator can do it. A teacher sees the banner but no form, and is told to ask you. That is on purpose: a button that is going to refuse you is worse than no button.
• Your name is typed, not taken from your account. An agreement signed by "an account" is weaker than one a person put their own name and title to. What is recorded is the name you type, your role, the exact version of the document, and the moment you accepted it.
• It is per school. A district administrator holding several schools accepts for each one. The addendum describes what happens to that school's records, so each school's acceptance is its own.

If the wording of the addendum is ever revised, the banner returns and an administrator accepts the new version. The old acceptance is kept, because the point of recording a version is being able to say which text somebody agreed to.

You can read it in full at any time: School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum.

Adding your teachers

Open the school view and choose the Staff tab. Type the teacher's email address, choose their role, and press Add them.

They join the school the first time they sign in with that address. There is nothing for them to accept and no link to click, so nothing can expire in a spam folder.

Two things worth telling your staff:

• Use the address they will actually sign in with. An invitation held against a personal address and a sign-up with a work address do not meet, and the result is a teacher signed in with no school attached.
• They do not need an account first. Signing up with the address you added is enough.

The roles are:

A teacher sees the students in their own classes. They do not see the rest of the school. This is not a setting that can be loosened, and it is deliberate: it keeps the number of adults who can read any given child's record to the ones who actually teach them.

A district administrator can only be added to a district, not to a single school, and only by somebody who already administers that district.

Removing somebody

Same screen. Remove takes away their access; Cancel invitation withdraws one that has not been claimed yet.

Removing a teacher does not touch their classes or their students. A teacher leaving in March does not take a term of children's work with them: the classes stay with the school and another teacher can pick them up.

Two things the screen will not let you do, on purpose:

• Remove yourself. You would be locking yourself out of your own school. Ask another administrator.
• Remove the last administrator. A school with nobody who can administer it can only be repaired by us. Add the replacement first, then remove the person leaving.

Seats

A seat is one student. The count you bought is the count enforced.

You can see seats used against seats licensed in two places: the line under your school name in the classroom, and the Seats column in the school view.

If an import would take you past the limit, it is refused rather than silently truncated. You will know, and you will know before the codes are printed.

To add seats mid-year, email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school and the number you need.

Licenses

Until a license is active, teachers can do everything except have students sign in. Classes, rosters and codes can all be prepared in advance, which is the right way to use the week before term.

When a license lapses:

• Students can no longer sign in.
• Teachers and administrators can still sign in, and can still read, export and print every record.

Nothing is deleted when a license lapses. Records are kept and become available again when the license is renewed. What happens if the school ends the relationship entirely is covered in the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum and summarized in Privacy and student records.

Districts

A district sits above its schools. A district administrator sees every school under it, can drill into any class, and can export at any level. A school administrator sees only their own school and cannot see the district or its other schools.

The end of a school year

Do not reuse last year's classes.

1. Create new classes with the new school year, for example 2027-28.
2. Import the new rosters into them.
3. Leave the old classes alone.

Last year's records stay intact and readable, which is what you need when a parent asks in the autumn about work done in the spring, and what a district needs for any kind of year over year comparison.

Students who return keep their existing progress. A child who passed level 1 in third grade does not repeat it in fourth.

What Skhillz Academy staff can see

Our staff can see the counts and license state needed to set your school up, and nothing a child wrote. We do not have independent access to student records: the school owns them, we hold them on the school's behalf, and that is a contractual commitment in the FERPA addendum rather than an internal policy we can change.