How can I let staff update their own contact information?

The custom staff fields has been a point of confusion for many districts since the teacher table was removed and split into Users and SchoolStaff. As there was a lot of requests for assistance with creating good fields for staff we added some custom fields to our plugins. This includes a custom cell phone, secondary email, and voice/text toggles for the stock home_phone field.

What can staff do?

This depends on what you want them to do and if they have staff edit rights. Users who have staff edit rights within the admin portal can go to a staff record and click on the BrightArrow link and update the information as needed regardless of the individual setting.

However for staff who can not edit other staff records or for staff that can only log into PowerTeacher you can grant them access to view their info, edit their custom info but not stock, or edit all.

The Settings

There are settings that determine what level the My Contact Info page will be.

Go to the BrightArrow settings page
System Management > Data > BrightArrow Settings
Find Staff Contacts
The drop down has several options. Choose which one best suits your needs.
1. View My Contacts -> Allows users to view their data but not edit it
2. Edit My Custom Contacts -> Allows users to view home phone, school phone, email address but not edit it. The custom fields are editable allowing users to manage their own custom data while leaving the stock fields alone.
3. Edit My Contacts -> Allow users in the admin portal to edit all fields on the page including home phone, school phone and email address.
  **NOTE: This option will make stock fields editable in the admin portal only. The stock fields will still be read only in PowerTeacher

How do staff get to the page to view/edit their information?

How can I edit my contact information?

What happens to the Emergency Contacts information?

That information stays inside PowerSchool and does not transfer to BrightArrow. That is for school use only. If there is a desire by schools to use this information within BrightArrow let us know and we'll add an option to enable those fields in the exports.

Why can't I select Edit My Contacts?

If you are in the settings page from within a school you will only be able to set the staff contacts setting up to the maximum that was set in the district row. If the district only goes up to Edit My Custom Contacts then that is the maximum any school can go as well. No school can do more than the district as a whole.

If that option is desired at some buildings but not others the district can be set to Edit My Contacts (full) and schools that want less can be set lower and schools that want full can be set to full.

What if I have custom staff fields?

If you have custom staff fields we can incorporate them into the page. However before blindly saying yes we'll want to look at how they are set up

Are they still the old legacy fields tied to the long defunct "teachers" table?
Are they fields that were auto-migrated to a SchoolStaff extension?
Are the proper User fields that are duplicates of our fields and exist in a table by themselves with no other data?

If they are any of these we'll want to talk to you about using our fields or properly migrating fields. However we will not force you to change fields. We will offer to help update custom pages that use your fields to include ours instead should you agree to move the data to help make the transition easier.

Why are SchoolStaff and Teacher fields always discouraged?

Over 10 years ago PowerSchool created a new way to have a teacher work in multiple buildings. Prior to the change the teachers table would contain a separate record for the same person for each school they taught in. This record would be a stand alone record which included the teacher's name and other information that didn't change when they changed buildings. In this update the teachers table was replaced by 2 tables, Users and SchoolStaff. Users contained all the data that was about a person regardless of where they were, 1 record per person. SchoolStaff contained all the other information from the teachers table that may change between buildings such as preferred room and active status.

Since the migration is not able to know if your custom field changes per building or not it chooses to use the table most like the old teacher table which is why if you don't stop it it migrates the field to a SchoolStaff extension. However teachers don't have separate cell phones for each building they teach in. If an art teacher teaches in 4 buildings then they'll have 1 user record and 4 school staff records. Any field added to the user table happens just to that 1 record. Any field added to school staff has a separate record for each school. In the example there'd be 4 separate cell phone values. While understandable why the auto-migrate process puts fields in SchoolStaff, most of the time it's not correct for what we are doing.

Teacher fields would be fields that were made the old way and went into the "custom" field within the teachers table. These fields haven't been migrated to DB Extensions and are slow, very slow, so we ask to move to our fields or to allow us to help you migrate your fields properly before PowerSchool's default migration takes over.

SchoolStaff fields exist per building (including District Office). This means our art teacher who teaches in 4 buildings could tell someone at the first school that they changed their cell phone number and that schools edits their record at that school. And since it's a district system that teacher would be justified in assuming their obligation to tell someone is complete. But the other 3 schools will still have the old value. Exports will have to combine all the different values of that field which don't agree.

User fields, on the other hand, exists off of the single record that represents that person at all buildings they belong to. Fields there are 1, not 1 per school, so changing them in 1 school means al the schools have that information.