Admin guide — the school workspace
You are a school admin — the person who runs MySentinel for your campus day to day. This guide walks the whole /admin workspace, section by section, in the order you will actually use it. Sign in at the staff login with your admin email (the demo account is admin@example.com, password password123).
A note on language used throughout the app and this guide: people are learners (never “students”), gate events are check in / check out (never “movements” or “clocking”), and the adults who receive notifications are guardians. Colour means one thing only: red = emergency, green = confirmed, amber = queued or at-risk. Nothing else is red.
Passkey step-up. Once you enrol a passkey on your account, the most sensitive actions ask you to confirm with that passkey before they run. Expect this on settings that change safety behaviour and on broadcast-style actions. It is a quick tap, not a second login.
Dashboard — “Today’s school status”
The dashboard is answer-first: it tells you whether anything needs you before it shows you numbers. A Live chip in the top corner confirms the page is streaming in real time (it falls back to “Auto-refreshing” if the live connection drops, so you are never looking at stale safety data).
The verdict line
At the top you get a plain-English verdict, e.g. “Nothing needs your attention right now · 0 on-site · 0 left for the day · 10 no tap yet.” When everything is accounted for, the hero number turns green and reads “Everyone is accounted for.” If learners are unaccounted for, the hero shows the count in amber.
Right below it is the search box — “Find a learner — is who in or out right now?” Type a name to jump straight to one learner’s live status.
The four tiles
| Tile | What it counts |
|---|---|
| On-site | Learners currently checked in and on campus |
| Checked in today | Total check-ins recorded today |
| Checked out today | Total check-outs recorded today |
| Total active learners | Your active roster size |
Daily actions
A row of one-tap shortcuts: Open attendance, Emergency message, Safety mode, Late pickups, Guardian approvals, Learners. These are the things admins reach for most, so they live above the fold.
Go-live checklist
While your campus is still being set up, a checklist shows what is left before you are fully live:
- Learner roster imported
- X of Y learners checked in
- Active staff members
- WhatsApp connection status (shows WhatsApp not connected yet [Preview] until a provider is wired)
- Badges issued
- Photo encryption key ready
The card disappears once everything is green.
Today’s exceptions, class roll-up, and patterns to watch
- Today’s exceptions surfaces the handful of things that are off today (contact failures, stragglers).
- Class roll-up shows In / Out / Enrolled for every class at a glance.
- Current learner status is the live roster, each learner tagged On-site (green), Off-site (neutral — going home is normal, never red), or No tap yet (neutral).
- Patterns to watch is a calm, longer-horizon panel: Frequent late arrivals, Absence risk, Badge fleet health, and Guardian contacts failing. A Channels at risk card appears in amber when guardian channels are degrading — it is a warning, never an alarm.
Learners
The Learners section is your roster. From here you add a learner, open an individual learner record, and see each learner’s live in/out status. Learner photos are encrypted at rest with a per-school key (that key’s readiness is one of the go-live checklist items). Bulk roster set-up is done through Imports under Advanced rather than one at a time.
Classes
Classes shows every class, its enrolment, and its live In/Out roll-up. Opening a class lists its learners and their current status. Classes are also where the class-teacher scope is anchored: a class teacher only ever sees the classes assigned to them, and reassignments are handled by you, the admin — the class teacher cannot self-assign.
Attendance, Absences, and Day close
Attendance
The attendance page is your daily register, derived automatically from gate check-ins rather than typed in by hand.
Known polish crack (honest note): the attendance page currently renders in hardcoded English — it does not yet follow the Afrikaans/isiZulu selection the rest of the app honours. This is a tracked fix, called out here so it is not a surprise.
Absences
The Absences view lists learners with no check-in for the day so you can follow up. Absence nudges (configured in Settings) can prompt guardians automatically.
Day close
Day close lets you wrap up the school day. You can also have the system close the day automatically — see end-of-day auto-close in Settings — so the register finalises at a set time without anyone remembering to do it.
Emergency and Safety mode
These two sit together under Daily and are the only places that legitimately use red.
- Emergency sends an emergency message that broadcasts to guardians across every available channel at once (this is a true broadcast, not the everyday push-then-fallback path). Because it is high-consequence, expect the passkey step-up here.
- Safety mode puts the campus into an elevated-safety posture. Use it for lockdowns or evacuations.
Treat both as serious controls. Red in MySentinel always means a real emergency, so guardians learn to trust it.
The Queues
Under Queues you handle the day’s human exceptions — the things that need a person to approve, verify, or reply.
| Queue | What you do here |
|---|---|
| Pickup requests | Approve or decline guardian requests to collect a learner. |
| Guardian approvals | Approve newly linked guardians before they can act. |
| Guardian verification | Verify guardian contact details so notifications can reach them. This is where the dashboard’s amber “unverified guardians” card sends you. |
| Late pickups | Work through learners still on-site past the pickup curfew. The dashboard previews the highest-priority alerts; this is the full list. |
| Parent messages | Read and reply to messages guardians send through the parent portal. |
Each queue is a list with in-place actions (approve / decline with a reason) — you stay on the page; the row updates as you act, no full reloads.
Staff
Staff is where you manage the people who work the system: admins, officers, and class teachers. From here you invite staff, set their role, and assign class teachers to their classes. The number of active staff members is one of the go-live checklist items, so this is an early stop when setting up a campus.
Settings — every configuration group
Settings is deep. It is grouped so you can find one thing fast. Saving validates the whole form, and safety-affecting changes may ask for your passkey.
Branding and identity
- Display name, support email, support phone — what guardians see as “your school”.
- School logo — uploaded and shown in the app and on branded emails.
- Primary colour (default deep-teal
#1f6650) and accent colour (default gold#c8923a). These flow into the app and email theming.
Language
- Default language — English, Afrikaans, or isiZulu. This is your school’s fallback; individual staff can still override their own language from their account menu (Use school default / English / Afrikaans / isiZulu).
Day rhythm
- Late arrival threshold — the local time after which a check-in counts as late (feeds “Frequent late arrivals”).
- Pickup curfew — a time, a grace period, and the weekdays it applies on. Learners still on-site past it become late-pickup alerts.
- Notification sending window (quiet hours) — the start/end window outside which guardian notifications are held, so families are not pinged at unsociable hours.
- End-of-day auto-close — finalise the register automatically at a set time.
Going-home policy and express mode
- Going-home policy — “Learners may arrive and leave on their own.” Turn this on for schools where older learners self-release; turn it off where every release must be tied to a guardian. This is exactly the choice the officer sees at the gate (“arrived on their own” vs “dropped off by a guardian”).
- Express scan mode — a faster gate flow for high-volume scanning.
Visitor sign-in
Choose which fields the officer must capture for a visitor: phone, reason, ID (stored encrypted), and vehicle. You also maintain the destinations list (where a visitor is headed). ID and contact details for visitors are sealed and hashed at rest, in line with POPIA.
Gate zones and school calendar
- Gate zones — name your gates (e.g. Main gate, Sports gate). Zones power the dashboard’s per-gate filtering of the hourly flow chart.
- School calendar — mark closed days (holidays, public holidays) so absence logic and nudges do not fire on days you are shut.
Digests and nudges
- Morning digest — an optional daily summary to guardians, with a send time.
- Weekly family summary — an optional weekly roll-up.
- Absence nudges — automatic follow-ups when a learner has no check-in.
Offline pack
Configure the officer’s offline pack: allow it, include photos, and set its lifetime. This lets the gate keep working when connectivity drops.
Channels
- Emergency contact — the name and number used for emergencies.
- SMS channel — shown as Preview; it is operator-provisioned, meaning it stays in preview and silently falls back to email until the platform team connects a provider for your school.
- Channel usage metering — your running channel-usage counts, used for billing transparency.
Channel honesty (Roadmap where noted). App notifications and email are the live channels today. WhatsApp and SMS are Preview and per-school provider-gated — until a provider is connected, messages on those channels quietly demote to email rather than silently failing. Web push is real and proven in code, but needs VAPID secrets and a real-device check per environment before you should consider it fully live. The dashboard and go-live checklist always show the true state, so what you see is what is actually working.
Good habits
- Start your day on the Dashboard — read the verdict line first; only dig into tiles if it tells you to.
- Clear the Queues (approvals, verification, late pickups, messages) before they pile up — the amber cards on the dashboard point you straight at them.
- Keep Settings honest: the going-home policy, curfew, and visitor fields are what your officers and guardians actually experience, so set them to match how your campus really runs.
- Treat red as sacred — Emergency and Safety mode only.