Manage families and the roster

The roster is Lumicura’s backbone: it decides who can create an account, which grade channels each family lands in, and how many families your school is billed for. Keeping it accurate is the quiet job that makes everything else look effortless.

What the roster drives

• Account creation. Parents register by matching against the roster — right email, right last name. No roster entry, no account. See the parent-facing Sign in and set up your account.
• Channel membership. Grade channels follow children’s grades on the roster.
• The family record. Parents, households, children and grades — what families see in their own profile.
• Billing. Your subscription is based on the number of active families, kept in sync automatically as the roster changes.

Import the roster

Rosters come in from your student-information system’s export (for FACTS schools, a CSV export) rather than hand-entry:

1. Export the family/student data from your SIS.
2. Open Lumicura’s roster import and upload the file.
3. Review what the import will do — new families, updated grades, families no longer present — before confirming.

Import at the start of each year, and re-import when enrollment shifts. The email addresses matter most: they’re what parents register with. A roster full of one-parent-per-family entries or stale emails becomes a September of “I can’t register” messages.

The People page

Admin › People & roles is the working view over everyone the roster (and you) created — parents, staff, or both at once, filterable by role and by who has actually signed in. From a person’s Roles & access page you can:

• Change their role, with a required reason for the sensitive ones — every change lands in a role history you can audit later.
• Give them a display title — “PTA President” beside their name everywhere, instead of a generic role label. It renames the person, not the role.
• See who goes by something else. Parents can set their own display name — the name other parents see on their messages and sign-ups. The People list and each person’s page show it beside the roster name, never in place of it, so an unfamiliar name in a channel is always one lookup from the family it belongs to. Admin pages, the ledger, reports and exports all stay on roster names.
• Freeze sign-in access in a hurry, and restore it later.

Staff who aren’t parents — a teacher, the registrar, the office manager — are added right here with Add staff: name, email and a position (teacher, aide, registrar, office staff, bookkeeper, counselor, coach, and so on). They get an account and a welcome email. Parents never come in this way; they come from the roster import, and the page will remind you of that.

Two things about a position are worth being precise about:

• It’s a label, not a permission. What someone can do comes from their role; the position just says what they do at the school, so a list of people reads like your staff directory instead of a wall of “Faculty.” Making the registrar a registrar grants nothing — if they need more access, change their role.
• A staff member who is also a parent is one person, not two. They keep their own family and roster entry and gain staff access on top of it. Don’t create a second account for their staff side.

Filtering People by Staff gives you everyone with a staff role, whether or not they also have children enrolled. When a staff member leaves, remove the staff account itself — that revokes their access and tidies up their committee memberships in one action. (For someone who’s staff and a parent, removing the staff side leaves their family untouched, which is what you want.)

Mid-year changes

• New family enrolls — add them (or re-import); they can register minutes later.
• Registration troubles — it’s almost always a roster mismatch: different email, different last-name spelling. Fix the entry; the parent retries. There are no provisional accounts to clean up later — that’s deliberate.
• Family circumstances change — split households, name changes, grade corrections: edit the family record; channels and views follow.

Withdraw a family

When a family leaves the school, withdraw them — don’t try to delete history:

• Their commitment history and credit records are preserved (you’ll want them at year-end and for any settling-up).
• They drop out of your billed family count.
• Their roster-driven access winds down cleanly. Withdrawal is a transition, not a trapdoor — families keep access for a short grace period rather than being cut off mid-conversation, then access ends on its own.

Withdrawing rather than deleting is what keeps your records coherent: the family’s year still adds up, even after they’re gone.