Skhillz Script teacher’s manual

Skhillz Script teaches children to write cursive by hand, on a screen, one movement at a time. It is not a worksheet that has been photographed and put online. The program shows a child how a letter is made, watches them trace it, then watches them write it unaided and scores what they produced.

This manual is for the adult side of that. It assumes nothing about your technical background and everything about your teaching one.

What you need

• A device for each child, or a shared set. A tablet with a stylus is best, a laptop with a trackpad works, a mouse works poorly.
• A current browser. Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox are all fine.
• An internet connection to sign in and to save work. Practice itself keeps running if the connection drops, and the work goes up when it returns.
• An active license on your school. Without one, students cannot sign in. You can still set up classes and import your roster while you wait.

The two doors

There are two completely separate ways into Skhillz Script, and mixing them up is the most common early confusion.

They do not connect. A school never sees a child's home account, and a parent never sees the school's. This is deliberate and it is written into the database rules, not just the screens. If a child uses the program at home as well as at school, those are two separate records of practice.

The first twenty minutes

1. Sign in at skhillzscript.com/signin with the email your administrator invited. If nobody has invited you yet, see Administrator setup.
2. Open your classroom. Create one class. Give it a period and a school year. See Setting up your classes.
3. Import your roster from a spreadsheet. You will get back a login code for every child. See Adding students.
4. Print the codes and cut them into cards.
5. Before the children touch it, sit down and do one letter yourself, all the way through. Watch the demonstration, trace it, write it, look at the score. Ten minutes here saves an hour of questions later.

How to use this manual

Chapters are in reading order and each one stands alone. If you are looking for a specific problem rather than reading through, go straight to When something goes wrong, which is organized by what you are seeing rather than by what caused it.

Every chapter prints cleanly. If your school wants a paper copy in the staff room, open a chapter and use your browser's print command.

Everything you do as a teacher hangs off a class. Students belong to a class, reports are grouped by class, and the login codes are handed out a class at a time. So the first thing to get right is what your classes are called.

Creating a class

Open your classroom. Below your existing classes there is a row of three boxes and an Add class button.

Fill them in and press Add class. The class appears immediately as a chip above. Click a chip to select that class, and everything below the chips then applies to it.

Why period and school year matter

A teacher with first, second and third period has three sets of thirty children who are all doing the same thing. If all three classes are called Cursive, you will be guessing which chip is which for the rest of the year.

The class label you see everywhere in the system is built from all three parts:

• 1st Period · Cursive (2026-27)

That label is what shows on the class list, in the school view, on exports, and on the student's own screen when they sign in. It is worth thirty seconds now.

School year matters for a second reason. When September comes, you do not edit last year's class. You create a new one for the new year and import the new roster into it. Last year's class stays exactly as it was, which is what you want when a parent asks in November how their child did in the spring.

Ordering

Classes are listed newest school year first, then by period. A class with no school year sorts below ones that have it, which is another reason to fill it in.

Independent teachers, co-ops and micro-schools

If you are not part of a school that has already been set up for you, the first thing you will see is a small card asking what your school is called. Type the name of your co-op, micro-school or tutoring practice and press Create it. That creates the organization, makes you its teacher, and takes you to the normal classroom screen.

Before a license is active

You can create classes and import your whole roster before your school's license is switched on. You will see a notice saying so at the top of the screen. Everything saves. The only thing that does not work yet is the students signing in, and that starts working the moment the license goes active, with no further action from you.

Changing or removing a class

Class editing is not in the teacher screen yet. To rename a class, move a student between classes, or archive a class mid-year, email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school, the class label and what you want changed. This is deliberate rather than missing: a class is the unit that student records hang from, and a mis-click that detached thirty children from their history would be a bad afternoon.

Two ways in, and they end in the same place: every child has a record and a login code.

• Type them in, one at a time, into named boxes. Best for a handful, and for the child who joins in March.
• Paste or upload a spreadsheet, for a whole class at once. You will never create thirty accounts by hand.

Before you start

Select a class first. Click the class chip in your classroom so it is highlighted. The Add students panel only appears once a class is selected, because a student has to be added to something.

If you are a school administrator working from the school view, open the class first and the same panel appears underneath it, headed Add students to 1st Period · Cursive so you can see whose class you are adding to.

First, somebody has to accept the addendum

Until an administrator has accepted the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum for your school, no student can be created at all. You will see a banner at the top of the screen saying so, and if you try anyway the system answers:

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

This is deliberate. The addendum is the document that says the school owns its students' records, that we hold them on the school's behalf, and that we have no independent access to them. Gathering that agreement after the children are already in the system would make it a formality.

If you are an administrator, the banner carries the form. Type your name and your role and press Accept on behalf of the school. Your name is typed rather than taken from your account, because an agreement signed by "an account" is weaker than one a person put their name to. Students can be added immediately afterwards.

If you are a teacher, the banner tells you so and does not show you a form that would refuse you. Ask whoever set the school up. It takes them about ten seconds. See Administrator setup.

Typing students in

Four boxes, and only the first is required:

Fill them in and press Add to the list. The child drops into a table below headed 3 ready to add, and the boxes clear ready for the next one. The grade stays put between children, because a class is usually one grade and retyping it thirty times is how a teacher gives up halfway.

Nothing has been created yet. That is the point of the waiting list: the moment to fix a typo is before it becomes a child's record, so each row has a Remove link next to it.

When the list looks right, press Add 4 students to this class. The button counts what is waiting, so it always says how many you are about to create.

A whole class from a spreadsheet

Open Have a spreadsheet? Paste or upload it instead. It sits collapsed under the typed boxes, because most days you are adding one child rather than thirty.

The import wants four columns, in this order:

1. First name
2. Last name
3. Grade
4. Age

Only the first name is required. A row with an empty first name is skipped rather than creating a nameless child.

Press Download the template to get a file with the headings already in place:

first_name,last_name,grade,age
Ada,Lovelace,3,8
Alan,Turing,3,9

Then either:

• Fill the template in a spreadsheet, save as CSV, and press Choose a file.
• Export a roster from your own student information system and Choose a file. You do not need to reformat it first. See below.
• Paste the rows straight into the box. Copying a block of cells out of a spreadsheet and pasting works.

Then press Add these students.

It is forgiving about your file

A roster exported from your school's system will not match the template exactly, and it does not have to.

• Headings can be in any order. grade,first_name,age,last_name is fine.
• Headings can be spelled loosely. First Name, firstname and FIRST_NAME all read the same.
• Quotes around values are stripped.
• If the file has no heading row at all, the four columns are assumed to be in the standard order.
• Blank lines are ignored.

What it will not do is guess at a file with no first name column anywhere. If you see No students found in that. Check the file has a first name column., that is what happened.

What you get back

However you added them, a table appears with every child and their login code.

The login code is the child's entire credential. There is no password. See How students sign in for why, and for what that means on a shared tablet.

Printing the cards

Two buttons sit under the table:

• Download the login roster saves a CSV with names, grades, ages and codes. Useful for a mail merge, or for keeping in your own records.
• Print it opens your browser's print dialog on that table. Print it, cut it into strips, and hand each child their line.

Print the codes before the lesson, not during it. Reading a code aloud to a room of second graders is a long afternoon.

Why age and grade

Both are optional and both are useful.

Grade appears on your class table and on the student's page, so you can see at a glance whether a struggling child is a young third grader or an old one. Age is held for the same reason.

Neither is required to use the program, and no date of birth is collected anywhere in Skhillz Script. See Privacy and student records.

When somebody else adds to your class

A school administrator can add students to any class in their school, including yours. When that happens you are told. A line appears at the top of your classroom saying who added how many children, to which class, and when:

Ms. Okafor added 6 students to 1st Period · Cursive on 9/14/2026.

Press Got it to clear it. Nothing is hidden from you and nothing needs your approval; you are simply not left to discover six new children on your own.

This does not take the job away from you. You can still add your own students whenever you like, exactly as above.

Removing a student

A student who leaves your class is not removed from the classroom screen by you. Email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school, the class and the child. This is a records question rather than a convenience one: for a school, a child's practice history is an education record, and what happens to it is covered in the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum.

A school student has no email address and no password. Their login code is the whole credential. This is on purpose: asking a seven year old to remember an email and a password is asking for a lesson spent resetting passwords.

The address

Students go to skhillzscript.com/student

Not the home page, and not the same page you sign in on. Write it on the board. If your school uses managed devices, ask whoever manages them to set that as a bookmark or a home page on the class set. It saves five minutes every single lesson.

The code

The code looks like S-ABCD-2345.

• Capitals or lower case both work.
• Dashes or no dashes both work. sabcd2345 gets in.
• Spaces at either end are ignored.

The child types it and presses Start. That is the entire sign-in.

What they see

The system opens with a greeting using their first name, their class shown on the right, and a Finish button. Everything else on the screen is the lesson itself, described in How a lesson works.

Shared devices

This matters and it is worth reading twice.

The code is remembered only for as long as the browser tab is open. Close the tab and the next child gets a clean sign-in screen. That is chosen deliberately: on a shared cart tablet, a credential that survives the session is a credential the next child inherits.

The consequence for you is a classroom routine:

1. At the end of a session, the child presses Finish, or closes the tab.
2. The next child signs in with their own code.

If a child forgets to press Finish and hands the tablet straight over, the next child will be writing under the first child's name. There is no way for the system to know the person holding the stylus changed. Make Finish the last thing they do, the way you would make putting the lid on a marker the last thing they do.

What happens to the work

Practice is scored on the device as the child writes, so a dropped connection does not stop the lesson. The results are sent up to your class records:

• as they practice, a couple of seconds after each burst of work,
• when they press Finish or close the tab,
• and once a minute regardless, as a backstop.

If the network is genuinely down, the work stays on that device and goes up the next time the same child signs in on the same device. This is why a child who practiced on the library laptop during an outage should be sent back to the library laptop rather than a different one.

Signing in on a different device

A student can sign in on any device with their code. When they do, whatever the school already holds for them is pulled down first, so they carry on where they left off rather than starting again.

Where two devices disagree about a letter, the better score wins. A child cannot lose a passed letter by practicing it badly on a different machine.

One message for every failure

If a code does not work, the screen says the same thing regardless of the cause:

That single message covers a mistyped code, a student who has been withdrawn, and a school whose license has lapsed. It is deliberately uninformative, because a message that told the difference would tell somebody guessing codes which ones exist.

For what to actually do about it, see When something goes wrong.

Every target in Skhillz Script, whether it is a single letter or a whole paragraph, is taught in the same three-part shape. It is the gradual release model that most teachers already use, built into the screen.

I Do, We Do, You Do

I Do. The child presses ▶ Watch Demo and the letter draws itself. A pen moves along the true stroke path: where to begin, which direction to travel, where the pen lifts, and where it comes back down. This is the part that a printed worksheet cannot do, and it is precisely the information children invent for themselves when nobody shows them. A child who draws a cursive a as a circle with a stick beside it has never been shown the movement.

They can press Replay Model as many times as they want.

We Do. The child traces over the letter. The line fills in behind the stylus but only where they actually went, so there is no scribbling across the shape to get to the end. Clear Row wipes the row and starts again. Check Trace tells them whether the trace was good enough to move on.

You Do. The guide letter goes away and the child writes it themselves on the ruled line. Then they press Submit Attempt and it is scored.

Levels 1 to 4 run all three parts. Levels 5 and 6 run the demonstration and then straight to writing, because by then the tracing stage is doing nothing for them. Level 7 is writing only, with the demonstration available if they want it.

What the score means

The score is not a sticker. Three separate things are measured, and the score you see is those three together.

A child can score badly for three completely different reasons, and the lesson you teach next is different in each case. That is the whole reason the three are kept apart rather than averaged into a single mysterious number. See Reading a student's results.

The five tries

Under the writing area is the 5-Try Mastery Tracker.

• A child gets five attempts at the target.
• The average of those five has to reach 70 to pass.
• Below 70, the target is not passed. They can press Practice 5 More and go again, and are steered back through the demonstration and the trace first.
• At or above 70, the target is passed and Next Target moves them on.

The average is what matters, not the best attempt. One lucky letter does not pass a child, and one shaky letter does not fail them. This is the single most important design decision in the program and it is worth explaining to children in those words: *nobody passes here by getting lucky once.*

The writing tools

Down the side of the writing area:

• Trace pen thickness: thin, medium or thick. Thicker helps a child with an unsteady hand see what they produced.
• Ink color: plain, for a child who finds the effects distracting.
• Demonstration speed: slow, normal or fast. Slow is the right setting for a first encounter with a letter, and most children never need to change it.

Trace Effects

On levels 1 to 4, a child chooses what their writing looks like as it appears: 🌈 Rainbow, 🌼 Flowers, ★ Stars, ✦ Sparkles, or No Effect. A successful attempt sets off a small celebration.

There is also a Reduce celebration effects switch. It turns all of it off in one action: the effects, the celebration, the movement. For a child who finds the animation overwhelming, or a class that has decided it is a distraction, turn it on and the program becomes entirely plain without losing a single teaching feature.

Effects are not available above level 4, because a paragraph covered in flowers is unreadable.

The certificate

When a child finishes level 6, a Certificate of Completion becomes available in the sidebar, in their own name, with a Save as PDF button.

Level 7 is open practice with nothing after it, so it is not part of the certificate.

Running a lesson

A workable shape for a thirty-minute period:

1. Five minutes, whole class. You do one letter on the board, with the demonstration projected. Talk through the stroke aloud.
2. Twenty minutes, independent. Children work through their own targets. You walk the room.
3. Five minutes, wrap up. Children press Finish. You look at the class table afterwards for anyone who did not move.

The class table is at the top of your class in your classroom and shows completion, current level and when each child last practiced. A child who has practiced but not passed anything is a different problem from a child who has not practiced at all, and that table tells them apart at a glance.

What is in each one

Level 1 is always open. Every other level opens only when the one before it is finished. A child cannot skip to the paragraphs, because the paragraphs are built on the letters they would be skipping. Locked levels show a padlock in the sidebar.

The letters are not in alphabetical order

This is the part most worth understanding, because children and parents both ask about it.

Cursive a, b and c require three completely unrelated hand movements. Teaching them in that order asks a child to start from nothing three times in a row. So the letters are grouped by the movement they share. Each group drills one motion until it is automatic, and then the next letter in the group is mostly a variation on something the hand already knows.

Lowercase, in teaching order

Uppercase, in teaching order

The letter dropdown in the sidebar is grouped under these headings, so a child picking a letter to practice sees the family it belongs to.

Letter heights

Children get this wrong constantly and it is the single most common cause of a low placement score.

• Most lowercase letters stop at the dotted middle line: a c e i m n o r s u v w x z.
• The tall letters reach the top line: b d f h k l t.
• Some letters drop below the bottom line: g j p q y, and f.
• Capitals touch the top line.

The program shows a dotted middle line early on to aim at. Part way through level 5 it disappears, and the child is holding the size themselves. That is the transition from copying a letter to writing, and a dip in scores at that point is expected rather than alarming.

Level 3 and their own name

Level 3 is the child's own name. It is the point at which most children decide whether they like cursive, because it is the first thing they write that is actually theirs.

The name comes from what was entered when the student was added, so if it is spelled wrong on the card it will be spelled wrong here. Fix it before they reach level 3 rather than after.

Level 7 and open practice

Level 7 has no fixed list. The child types what they want to write and then writes it. There is nothing after it, so there is no level to unlock and no certificate attached to it.

It is the right place to send a child who has finished, and it is also useful as a directed activity: give the class a sentence from what you are reading and have them write that.

Teaching a level out of order

You cannot unlock a level for a child who has not earned it, and this is enforced in the database rather than only on the screen. If a child genuinely needs to work somewhere else, for example a fifth grader joining mid-year who already writes cursive, they still work through level 1, but they will move through it quickly because they will pass targets on the first five tries.

This is the chapter that turns the program into teaching. Everything else is setup.

Where to look

• The class table, at the top of a selected class in your classroom. One row per child. Use it to scan.
• The student page, reached by clicking a child's name in that table. One child in full. Use it when you want to know why.

The class table

Read Last practiced first. A child at 4% who practiced yesterday and a child at 4% who has not practiced since September are not the same child and do not need the same conversation.

The student page

At the top are four numbers averaged across every attempt that child has made.

Tries recorded is the one people skip. Averages over four attempts mean very little. Averages over two hundred mean a great deal.

What each pattern tells you to teach

This is the part worth learning properly, because the same low score has three different lessons behind it.

Accuracy is high, placement is low

The child knows the shape. They are writing it in the wrong place, or the wrong size. The letters are floating above the line, sitting below it, or drifting larger and larger across the row.

Teach: ruling and sizing. Go back to letter heights. Which letters stop at the dotted line, which reach the top, which drop below. Have them write four letters slowly and check each against the line before writing the next.

The student page tells you when it sees this, in words:

Placement is high, accuracy is low

The opposite, and more serious. The child is writing neatly on the line but forming the letter wrongly: starting in the wrong place, going the wrong direction round an oval, or lifting the pen where cursive does not lift.

Teach: formation. Send them back to ▶ Watch Demo on the slow setting, and watch it with them. Say the stroke aloud while it draws. Then have them trace before they write. A wrongly formed letter that is written neatly will get worse with practice, not better, because they are drilling the error.

The student page says:

Coverage is low, everything else is fine

They are stopping part way through. Usually this is a child who lifts the stylus at the point where the letter changes direction and never comes back, or a child racing.

Teach: finishing the stroke. One letter, slowly, all the way through, before they are allowed to do a second.

Everything is low

Look at the device before you look at the child. A finger on a tablet, or a mouse, will produce exactly this. See When something goes wrong.

Needs more practice

A list of the targets below 70, worst first. This is your small-group list. If six children share three letters in that list, that is tomorrow's mini-lesson and you did not have to work it out yourself.

Took the most tries

The five targets that child attempted most. A target that took a child eighteen tries and eventually passed is more interesting than one that failed, because it tells you where the effort went.

Every try

The full table, grouped by target: every score in order, the average, and whether it passed.

Read the sequence, not just the average. 42 · 51 · 63 · 70 · 78 is a child learning in front of you. 71 · 44 · 80 · 39 · 76 is a child whose attention is going in and out, which is a completely different conversation. The averages are close to identical.

Exporting

Export CSV on the student page gives you every single attempt with all three measures, one row per try. Print / PDF gives you the page as it appears, which is the version to take into a conference.

On the class table in the school view, Export CSV gives you one row per child instead.

What the numbers do not tell you

The program measures how a letter was formed. It does not measure whether a child understood what they wrote, whether they were trying, or whether they were having a bad day. It is evidence for your judgment, not a replacement for it.

Skhillz Script also never stores an image of a child's handwriting. Only the measurements come off the device. If a parent asks to see their child's actual writing, the answer is that we do not keep it, and the reason is in Privacy and student records.

Writing a note

At the bottom of a student's page there is a box: *What did you notice? What should they work on next?*

Type the note, choose who can see it, and press Add note. Notes appear newest first, each stamped with the date and who it is visible to.

Who can see it

There are two settings and the choice matters.

The default is staff only. That is the right default: a note you wrote quickly during a lesson should not appear in front of the child without you having decided that it should.

A note shown to the student appears once, above the writing area, with your name on it, and they can dismiss it. Keep those short and keep them about the writing. *"Your ovals are much rounder this week"* is worth more than a paragraph.

Why there is no "share with the parent"

There used to be, and it did nothing. A school student has a login code and no account, and no parent is linked to them anywhere, because under the school data rules the school holds the record and a parent goes through the school. There was no parent for the system to share with, so the note was stored, shown to staff, and read by nobody.

To get a note to a parent, use Print / PDF at the top of the student's page. That prints the whole report, notes included, and it is the version to take into a conference.

What makes a useful note

The numbers already record what happened. A note is for what the numbers cannot see.

• Good: *Holds the stylus in a fist. Grip is the reason the ovals are square, not the demonstration.*
• Good: *Left handed. Turned the tablet 30 degrees and accuracy went up immediately.*
• Less useful: *Struggling with a.* The data already says that.

Reports for a conference

Two buttons at the top of the student page:

• Print / PDF gives you the page as it appears: the three measures, what needs more practice, what took the most tries, every attempt, and the notes. This is the version to bring to a parent conference. It reads as a report rather than a spreadsheet.
• Export CSV gives you every individual attempt as data: level, target, date, try number, score, path accuracy, target coverage, size and placement. This is the version for your own analysis, or for a specialist who wants the raw numbers.

For a whole class or a whole school, use the same two buttons in the school view, where they export the level you are currently looking at.

Printing

Everything in the teacher screens is built to print. Backgrounds, buttons and navigation drop away and the tables carry across pages with their headings repeated. Use your browser's print command anywhere, not only where there is a button.

A teacher works in the classroom. A principal, a curriculum lead or a district administrator works in the school view, which sits above it.

If you open it and see *Nothing to show*, you are a teacher rather than an administrator, and your students are under your classes instead. That is not an error.

Two tabs

Progress is the drill-down described below. Staff is who has access: adding a teacher, and removing somebody who has left. The two are kept apart on purpose. Adding a teacher and reading a child's attempts are different jobs, and putting them on one screen invites doing the second while meaning to do the first.

Adding and removing staff is covered in Administrator setup.

The three rungs

The screen is a drill-down with a breadcrumb across the top, and you move down one rung at a time.

1. Schools. Every school you oversee.
2. Classes. Every class, or just the ones in the school you opened.
3. Students. The children in one class.

Click a name to go down. Click a breadcrumb to come back up. Click a student's name to open their full page, which is the same page a teacher sees, described in Reading a student's results.

The schools table

Students against Practicing is the number to watch in the first month. A school with 240 students and 31 practicing has a rollout problem, not a teaching problem, and the fix is usually that the login cards never got printed or the address never got bookmarked.

Seats tells you when you are approaching the license limit. See Administrator setup.

The classes table

Needing help is the column that earns this screen. It surfaces the children who are stuck without anybody having to open thirty student pages, and it is the right thing to bring to a grade level meeting.

What an administrator can and cannot see

You see counts, averages and progress. You see individual students in classes within your own school or district.

You do not see anything outside your own school or district, and neither does anybody else see into yours. This is enforced by the database rules that answer every request, not by hiding buttons. An administrator at another school cannot reach your students by guessing an address.

There is also no route from a school to a child's home account, or from a home account into a school. They are separate records entirely.

Exporting

Export CSV exports whatever level you are looking at:

• On the schools view, one row per school: name, type, students, average completion, seats used, seats licensed.
• Inside a class, one row per student: name, grade, login code, targets passed, completion, current level, last active.

Print / PDF prints the current view as it appears on screen, with the navigation removed and table headings repeated on each page.

Reading the numbers honestly

Average completion across a school is a rollout measure, not a teaching one. Early in a year it mostly tells you which classes have started. Completion only becomes a quality signal once Practicing is close to Students.

If you want to know whether the program is working, open one class, sort your attention to the Needing help count, and read three students in full. Three students read properly will tell you more than any school average.

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.

Organized by what you are looking at, not by what caused it.

Signing in

A student's code does not work

The screen says *That login is not working. Check the card and try again, or ask your teacher.* It says that for every possible cause, so work down this list.

1. Check the address. It must be skhillzscript.com/student. The home page and the ordinary sign-in page will not take a student code. This is the cause about half the time.
2. Check the code against your class table. Open the class in your classroom and read the Code column. Codes are easy to miscopy: 0 and O, 1 and I.
3. Check the license. If the line under your school name says *no active license yet*, no student at your school can sign in. Speak to your administrator. Everything you have set up is intact and will start working the moment the license goes active.
4. Check the student is in a class. A child who was never imported has no code at all.

Capitals, lower case, dashes and missing dashes are all fine, so none of those are the problem.

A teacher cannot sign in

Teachers sign in at skhillzscript.com/signin with an email and a password, not a code.

• If they have never signed in before, they must sign up with exactly the email address the school gave us. An invitation held against one address and a sign-up with another will not meet, and the result is a teacher signed in with no school attached.
• If they signed up with the wrong address, do not delete anything. Email support@skhillzacademy.org with both addresses.

Signed in but the classroom is empty

If they see *Set up your school* asking what the school is called, they are signed in but not attached to a school. Do not create a school here. That form is for independent teachers, co-ops and tutors, and using it will create a second, empty organization. Email support@skhillzacademy.org instead.

Importing a roster

"Before adding students, an administrator must accept..."

Nobody at your school has accepted the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum yet, and no student can be created until somebody does. Nothing is wrong with your file.

If you are an administrator, the banner at the top of your school carries the form: type your name and press Accept on behalf of the school, then import again. If you are a teacher, ask whoever set the school up. It takes them about ten seconds, and nothing you have already typed is lost. See Accepting the School Data Addendum.

"Nothing to add yet. Type a student in, or paste a list."

You pressed the button that sends the list before anything was on it. Typing a child into the boxes is only half the step: press Add to the list first, check they appear in the table underneath, then press Add 1 student to this class.

"No students found in that"

The file has no first name column that the import could recognize. Open it and check there is a column of first names. If the file has no heading row at all, the columns must be in the order first name, last name, grade, age.

Students imported twice

They did not. Importing the same list again does not create duplicates. The result table says how many were added and how many were already there.

If you genuinely see the same child twice, it is almost always a spelling difference: Katie and Katy are two different children as far as the import is concerned. Email support@skhillzacademy.org to have the duplicate removed and the practice merged.

The import was refused because of seats

You have reached the number of student places on your school's license. The import is refused rather than partly completed, so nothing is in a half state. Your administrator can see seats used against seats licensed in the school view, and adding seats is covered in Administrator setup.

A name is spelled wrong

Fix it before the child reaches level 3, which is where they write their own name. Email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school, the class and the correction.

Writing and scoring

Every score is low, for everybody

Look at the input device before you look at the children.

• A mouse produces poor handwriting from a competent adult. Scores in the 40s and 50s across a whole class using mice are the mice, not the class.
• A finger on a tablet is better than a mouse and much worse than a stylus.
• A stylus is what the scoring was built around.

If you have no styluses, a trackpad beats a mouse, and it is worth telling children plainly that the tool is making it harder, so they do not conclude they are bad at cursive.

One child scores low on everything

Check how they are holding the stylus, and check whether they are left handed and dragging their hand through what they just wrote. Turning the tablet 20 to 30 degrees clockwise fixes a lot of left handed writing immediately.

Then look at their student page and see which of the three measures is actually low. Low accuracy and low placement are different problems with different lessons.

A child says the score is unfair

Open their page and look at Every try for that target. The five individual scores are all there. Usually one of these is true:

• They passed and did not notice, because the pass is on the average of the five, not on the last one.
• Their accuracy is genuinely high and their placement is low, meaning the letter is well formed but off the line. That is worth saying out loud, because the child is right that their letter looked good.

The demonstration will not play

Press Replay Model. If nothing happens, reload the page. If it still does not play on that device but plays on another, it is that device, and the fastest path is a different one for that lesson.

The writing area does not respond to the stylus

• Check that palm rejection is on, if the tablet has it.
• Check the child is not writing with the stylus button held down.
• Reload the page. Nothing that was already submitted is lost by reloading.

Progress and records

A child's work has disappeared

Almost always one of three things.

1. They were signed in as somebody else. If a child took a tablet without the previous child pressing Finish, their work went onto that child's record. Check the other child's page for practice at that time. Email support@skhillzacademy.org to have it moved.
2. The device was offline. Work stays on the device it was written on and goes up the next time that child signs in on that same device. Send them back to the same machine.
3. They practiced at home rather than at school. A family account and a school account are entirely separate. Home practice does not appear in your class records and never will.

A child is on a different level than expected

Levels unlock in order and cannot be skipped, so a child on level 1 has not finished level 1. Open their page and look at Needs more practice for the targets still under 70.

A student page says "Not available"

That student is not in one of your classes. If they should be, email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school, the class and the child.

Printing produces a blank page

Reload the page and print again. If your school uses a managed browser, check that printing background graphics is allowed, which is a browser setting rather than anything in Skhillz Script.

Certificates

The certificate is not there

It appears when level 6 is finished, not level 7. Level 7 is open practice with nothing after it and is not part of the certificate.

The name on the certificate is wrong

It comes from the name the child was imported with. Have it corrected, and the certificate will carry the corrected name.

Still stuck

Email support@skhillzacademy.org. Include:

• your school and class,
• the child's first name and login code,
• the device and browser,
• what you expected and what happened instead.

Those four things are the difference between an answer today and three emails over a week.

Teachers get asked these questions by parents, usually at the worst moment. This chapter is so you can answer without going to look for somebody.

The binding versions are the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum, the Privacy Policy and the Children's Privacy Notice. This chapter is a plain summary and does not replace them.

The short answer for a parent

That is worth learning as a sentence, because it is the question parents actually ask and the answer surprises them.

What is collected about a student

• First name, and last name if the school provided one
• Grade and age, if the school provided them
• The login code
• Which letters, words and sentences were practiced
• The three measurements from each attempt, and the resulting score
• The date and time of each attempt
• Any notes a teacher writes

What is never collected

• No image, recording or reconstruction of the handwriting. The strokes are measured on the device and only the measurements leave it.
• No date of birth. Age and grade are collected, a birth date is not.
• No email address or password for a student. School students have neither.
• No advertising of any kind to children, and no use of a child's information for targeted advertising.
• No biometric profile. The handwriting is not used to identify or authenticate the child.

Who can see a student's record

The last two rows are the ones that surprise people.

Parents and the school record. When a school buys the license, the school owns the record. A parent's right to see it runs through the school, the same as any other education record. If a parent asks us directly, we refer them to the school. Give them a printout from the student page and the conversation is over in a minute.

Our own staff. We do not have independent access to student work. Our provisioning screen deliberately shows seat counts and license dates and no student writing, because setting up an account is not a reason to read a child's practice. That is a contractual commitment in the FERPA addendum, not an internal policy we could quietly change.

School records against family records

A child who uses Skhillz Script at school and at home has two separate records that never meet.

• The school record belongs to the school and is visible to their teacher.
• The family record belongs to the parent and is visible only to them.

Neither can see the other. A parent cannot check up on classwork through their home account, and you cannot see home practice in your class table. Tell parents this up front and it prevents a whole category of confusion.

Notes

A note you write about a student is part of that student's education record. A parent may ask the school to see it, and that right does not depend on which visibility you chose when you wrote it. See Notes and reports.

Deletion

• A school or district administrator may request permanent deletion of student records. Once done it cannot be undone.
• Active-system data is ordinarily removed or de-identified within 90 days of a verified request.
• Encrypted backups may hold copies for up to 180 days before normal overwrite. Backups are not used for ordinary business activity, and are not searched to answer a question about a child.

We say the 180 days plainly rather than promising an instant erasure we could not honestly deliver. Any vendor telling you a deletion is instantaneous everywhere is telling you about their intentions rather than their backups.

If a parent objects to the program entirely

Take it to your administrator rather than trying to solve it in the classroom. Schools have their own processes for this, and the relevant terms are in the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum, which your district signed.

Questions we cannot answer for you

Whether your district's own policy allows a given use, whether a particular parent has already consented, and what your state requires. Those live with your district, not with us. What we can tell you is exactly what the product collects and who can see it, which is everything above.