Why MySentinel

Gate-to-guardian safety, one platform, every campus.

Every morning, learners pass through your gates — and behind each one is a guardian who simply wants to know their child arrived safely. MySentinel turns that gate moment into a confirmed, permanent record and a push-first notification, on a single platform built for South African schools.

This page is written to be checked. Where something is live, we say so. Where something is on the roadmap, we mark it Roadmap — because the honesty is part of what you are buying.

The problem

The gate is the highest-stakes, lowest-tech moment of the school day. A learner arrives or leaves; today most schools log it on paper, in a WhatsApp group, or not at all. Nobody can answer “who is on-site right now?” with confidence. Guardians are anxious and hard to reassure at scale — a parent at one campus gets a message, at another, nothing. And POPIA has raised the floor: learner and guardian personal information, subject-access requests, and retention windows are now legal obligations, not nice-to-haves.

You don’t need a school-management system. You need the gate done right, everywhere, the same way.

What it does — gate to guardian

A security officer scans a learner’s NFC badge at the gate on their phone. MySentinel resolves the learner, confirms the check in or check out, records it permanently, updates a real-time admin dashboard and attendance, and notifies every verified guardian — push first.

The officer’s screen is deliberately boring to use and impossible to get wrong. The instant a badge resolves, the officer sees the learner’s name and photo (or their initials, with a plain prompt to confirm identity another way if there’s no photo on file). Direction is inferred — arriving or leaving — with a one-tap override. Releasing is honest about real South African school life: “arrived on their own” for learners who walk, taxi or come with a sibling, or “dropped off by a guardian” when a named adult is involved. Guardian presence is recorded, but never required.

The confirmation is unmistakable: a green “Checked in” or “Checked out”, the recorded time, and “Guardians are notified on their verified contacts.” Green means the record is confirmed at the school; amber means it is safely saved on the device and will send itself the moment the signal returns. An officer never has to wonder whether a scan “took”.

The honesty contract

A safety platform that over-promises is worse than no platform — because a guardian who was told “you’ll always know” and then heard nothing trusts you less than before. So MySentinel is built so that every claim is true:

• Every “sent” is real. A guardian is only counted as notified when a channel genuinely confirmed the message. If nothing confirmed, the system reports it as not delivered rather than inflating a number.
• Channels are honest. App push, email and WhatsApp are the everyday channels, all included. Each one shows its real state for that school rather than a generic label, and a channel that cannot deliver yet falls back quietly rather than pretending to.
• Every campus is sealed off from every other. A user in one school can never see another school’s learners.
• Every gap is named out loud. What is on the roadmap is marked as such, before you find it.

How guardians are reached — the channel ladder

Guardians are reached down an ordered ladder, highest-trust and lowest-cost first: app push → email → WhatsApp → SMS. App push, branded email and WhatsApp are all included in the per-learner fee and live today — WhatsApp, the channel South African parents actually use, sends from MySentinel’s own business account, so a school opens nothing with Meta and pays nothing per message. The school switches the channel on; each guardian confirms their number once. SMS is the one channel a school arranges for itself, by connecting a provider. Guardians control their own mix (which channels, and quiet hours) from the parent portal, with no login. Emergency and safety messages always reach everyone, ignoring quiet hours. See Notifications for the full picture.

The guardian side — peace of mind, no app to install

Guardians don’t create accounts. They get a secure, private link to a portal showing each linked learner’s real-time status — “At school — arrived 09:39” — where they can view attendance, send sick notes, arrange pickups and set their notification preferences. Installing the app is optional and only adds phone push. This is the trust surface that, across many campuses, lets you make one promise to every parent — and keep it.

POPIA, built in

MySentinel is built around the Protection of Personal Information Act, not bolted onto it:

• Learner photos and guardian contact details are encrypted at rest, each school under its own key.
• Every security-relevant action is written to an append-only audit trail — records can be added but never edited.
• Data-subject rights are first-class: access, correction, and erasure (with a mandatory cool-off period), plus enforced retention windows.
• Sensitive actions require a passkey confirmation — a quick fingerprint or face check, not a second login.

The full detail is in Trust & POPIA.

Reliability by design

MySentinel runs entirely on Cloudflare’s global network — the same edge that fronts a fifth of the web. There are no servers for a school to run and no second cloud to operate. Each school’s data is isolated, the dashboard and parent portal update in real time, and the gate keeps working through a flaky signal because scans are held on the device and sent the moment connectivity returns. See Platform & reliability.

Per-campus identity, one product

Each campus carries its own display name, logo, colours, default language and going-home policy — so every campus is on-brand and in its parents’ language, without a separate build. The app UI ships in English, Afrikaans and isiZulu, with idiomatic translations rather than machine pastes.

Honest about the road ahead

• A group-owner view — a single login scoped to only your campuses — is on the roadmap. Today, group-wide oversight runs through the MySentinel team, and you pilot per campus.
• SMS is the one messaging channel a school still arranges for itself, by connecting a provider. Until it does, SMS is not used and the included channels carry the message. WhatsApp is not on this list — it ships included, on MySentinel’s own business account.
• A consolidated cross-campus academic report is on the roadmap; today the platform aggregates channel-usage and billing figures across campuses.

The ask — pilot 2–3 schools

Pilot two or three schools from your group. We onboard your chosen campuses through the app, exactly as a real rollout would. Your officers scan from day one, your dashboards update live, and your parents feel the difference in a week. From a proven multi-school footprint, we scale to the rest of the group.

Buy the gate done right, everywhere, the same way — and a vendor who tells you the truth about what is live. The roadmap is honest, the core is real, and the credibility is the deal.