The MySentinel guide for schools
MySentinel is an NFC-badge learner check-in and school-safety platform built for South African schools. A security officer scans a learner’s badge at the gate; MySentinel confirms the check in or check out, records it permanently, updates a live admin dashboard and attendance in about a second, and notifies every verified guardian — push, email and WhatsApp, all included in the per-learner fee. It speaks English, Afrikaans and isiZulu, keeps learner photos and guardian contacts encrypted at rest, and is built around POPIA from the ground up.
This guide is written for the people deciding: principals, school-group leaders, and the IT and legal advisors who vet a platform before it touches learner data. It explains what MySentinel does, how a campus goes live, and exactly how it keeps your data safe — plainly, and honest about what is shipped versus what is on the roadmap.
Start here
- Why MySentinel — what it does, the honesty contract it is built on, and why schools trust it.
- Pricing — the per-learner model, what’s included, and a link to the estimator.
- Rollout — the six steps from kickoff to go-live, and the shape of a pilot.
What each section is for
| Section | Read it if you want to… |
|---|---|
| Why MySentinel | Understand the product, the outcomes, and the honesty that underpins it. |
| The persona guides | See the everyday experience for each role — officer, admin, class teacher, guardian. |
| Rollout | Know exactly how a campus goes live and what a pilot looks like. |
| Trust & POPIA | Vet the data-protection commitments — encryption, audit, data-subject rights, retention. |
| Platform & reliability | Understand where it runs and why it stays up. |
| Notifications | See how guardians are reached, and what messaging costs. |
The everyday guides
MySentinel is used by four everyday roles. Each guide is written in plain second person and scoped to exactly what that role sees.
| Role | What they do | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Officer | Scans badges at the gate, confirms check in / check out, signs visitors in and out. Works on a phone, offline-tolerant. | Officer guide |
| Admin | Runs the full school workspace — dashboard, learners, classes, attendance, emergency, safety mode, settings, staff, reports. | Admin guide |
| Class teacher | Captures the daily roll and approves pickup requests, scoped to their assigned classes only. | Class teacher guide |
| Guardian | Opens a private, tokenised parent portal — no login — to see each child’s real-time status and manage requests. | Guardian guide |
A quick orientation
- The gate is the hero. An officer taps a badge, picks In or Out, and chooses “arrived on their own” or “dropped off by a guardian” — guardian presence is recorded but optional. The screen confirms with an unmistakable green “Checked in”, a timestamp, and “Guardians are notified on their verified contacts.”
- The dashboard answers first. Admins land on “Today’s school status” — who is on-site, who has left, who has not tapped yet — with a go-live checklist, class roll-up, and patterns to watch.
- Honesty is built in. Notification channels never fake a “sent”; a message is only counted as delivered when a channel genuinely confirmed. Colours mean one thing each everywhere: green = confirmed, amber = queued or at-risk, red = emergency only.
Shipped today, and honest about the roadmap
We mark anything not yet live as Roadmap, because a buyer’s advisor will check — and the honesty is part of the product.
| Capability | Status |
|---|---|
| Officer gate flow — NFC badge tap on Android, guardian-optional release, offline-tolerant scanning | Shipped |
| Real-time admin dashboard, go-live checklist, deep per-school settings | Shipped |
| Class-teacher scoped workspace with live pickup approvals; tokenised parent portal | Shipped |
| Tenant isolation, passkey step-up for sensitive actions, encryption at rest, POPIA workflows | Shipped |
| Trilingual English / Afrikaans / isiZulu; guardian notifications by app push, email and WhatsApp | Shipped |
| WhatsApp guardian alerts — included in the per-learner fee, sent from MySentinel’s own business account; the school switches the channel on and each guardian confirms their number | Shipped |
| SMS — the one channel a school arranges for itself, by connecting a provider; until then the other channels carry the message | Activate per school |
| Group-owner view — a single login scoped to only your campuses (today, group oversight runs through the MySentinel team) | Roadmap |