The school workspace
Setting your school up
Every setting on the school settings page, what each one actually changes for a family, and which of them the system will not save without your passkey.
Almost everything a family experiences is decided here. What time counts as late, whether a child may leave alone, whether a message is sent at nine in the evening, which details a visitor must give. It is one long page, and it is worth walking once with somebody who knows the school’s rules.
The main form
Display name, Support email and Support phone are what a parent sees on a message from your school. Set the support details even if you think nobody will use them; the alternative is a family with a question and nowhere to send it. School logo, Primary color and Accent color brand the app and the emails, and Default language decides which of English, Afrikaans or isiZulu a family gets unless they have chosen otherwise.
Late arrival threshold is the time after which a first scan counts as late. Every late-arrival figure on your dashboard and in your reports is counted against it, so setting it wrongly quietly distorts several other screens.
The pickup-curfew block turns on the late-pickup watch, with the time, a grace period in minutes, and the weekdays it applies on. Separately, a hard campus-close time automatically checks out anybody still recorded on site at a set hour — a safety net for badges nobody tapped on the way out, not a substitute for tapping them. A school created today arrives with both already on — the curfew an hour after the campus close, the close set with your operator when the school was created — along with the no-show nudge and the morning digest, so the four safety nets are up from the first day and this screen is where you adjust the times rather than discover the switches. Schools set up before that change kept exactly the configuration they had.
Learners may arrive and leave on their own decides whether a learner can be recorded without an adult present; turn it off and every scan needs a guardian selected. Whether those on-their-own scans are recorded automatically is set by your operator and shown here read-only. Either way, a learner needing a guardian, an approved pickup, or under a custody arrangement always goes to the officer.
Four visitor toggles decide what an officer must capture: a phone number, a reason, the visitor’s identity number (stored encrypted), and a vehicle registration. Ask for the least you need.
Emergency contact name and Emergency contact number are the school’s own contact of last resort. The WhatsApp toggle records that the channel is set up for this school.
When messages go out
Notification sending window limits routine check-in and check-out messages to a start and end time. The hint under it is the important part: emergency, safety and late-pickup alerts are always sent immediately, whatever this window says. It exists so a school does not message working parents at half past ten at night about a scan, not so it can go quiet in an emergency.
Morning digest sends one daily summary to every administrator: learners not yet in, waiting requests and approvals, unread messages, and channel problems. It goes on school mornings only, within five minutes of the time you set, and the card tells you when it last went.
Weekly family summary sends guardians one summary message every Friday at 16:00.
Both can be held off by MySentinel across the whole platform. When that happens the toggle shows off and says so explicitly — your school’s own preference is still saved and applies again the moment the message is switched back on. If the page cannot check that state at all it says so, rather than hiding the two sections and letting them read as settings your school does not have.
Saving asks for your passkey
Pressing save on this form does not save immediately. The system stops and asks you to confirm with your passkey — a fingerprint, a face or a device PIN — and only then writes the change. Cancel and nothing is written.
That is because this one form decides curfews, whether a child may leave unaccompanied, and when families are told anything: a wider blast radius than any other page in the workspace, and not something that should be changeable by mis-tapping a phone. The change lands in the school activity log with your name against it.
The cards below the form
Gate zones name each gate where officers scan; an officer picks theirs when they start, and naming them is what makes the gate filters on the dashboard and the timeline useful. Up to ten, at least one, and removing a zone leaves past records carrying the name they were recorded with.
School calendar is where you add closed days. On a closed day the school does not send digests, absence nudges or late-pickup alerts — but a learner who scans still notifies their guardians, because the gate is the gate. Weekends, public holidays and out-of-term days are already handled without you.
Absence nudges switches on the one friendly morning message to guardians of a learner absent with no explanation, and sets the time it goes. Note the difference from the main form: this card saves as soon as you press save, with no passkey confirmation asked for and none required.
When attendance becomes a concern holds the three numbers that decide when a learner’s name is put on your attendance lists: the share of school days missed this year that makes a learner chronic, the share that makes them at risk, and how many late arrivals in the last seven days flag frequent lateness. Out of the box these are ten percent, five percent and three; a box you leave empty stays on those platform settings, and clearing a box you had filled goes back to them. The same values drive the dashboard tiles, the full pattern lists and the chronic-absenteeism report, so changing them here changes every screen that names a child at once. Like the nudge card, it saves without a passkey — these numbers tune labels, not who can leave with whom.
Offline pack lets officers download enough of the roster to keep working without a connection, optionally including learner photographs, for a number of hours you set. Photographs saved on a device are personal information, and the card says so: only enable it if your device-loss process is sound. Saving this card does ask for your passkey, because it is the setting that puts learner data on a phone.
SMS channel is read-only here — SMS is set up by your MySentinel operator, and the card tells you to contact support to change it. Channel usage shows what your school actually sent this month, and notes that WhatsApp is included for every school at no per-school cost.