For principals, superintendents, and district administrators
The adviser lays out the book and runs the staff. You answer for the building: the board packet, the state report, the family who calls about a photo, and the budget that has to close. SchoolAdministrator.Network is the operating picture for the person who runs the school -- every publication, the picture-day pipeline, and a free records tier on one student list, with the compliance story you hand to counsel built into the database instead of promised in a policy.
No contract, no minimum order, no overprint, no lock-in. Your district stays because the tool and the economics earn it -- never because a multi-year term traps you.
One roster, one login
Stop stitching a yearbook tool to a newspaper tool to a website host to a picture-day vendor to a records system. One student list, one staff list, one place the money is accounted for -- the operating picture a principal or superintendent can actually stand behind in a board meeting.
The yearbook, the newspaper, the literary magazine, and public online editions all run on the same roster and the same approval workflow. One login covers the program -- not five vendor portals with five invoices and five privacy postures to vet.
Live today
Permission-checked portraits flow straight into the student directory and ID cards. Photos are never sold, and a sale is possible only when permission allows it. Run your own picture day and the studio share drops, so the school keeps more of the margin.
Pipeline live -- parent store reads, no checkout
An ad-sales engine for senior tributes and business ads, and a fundraising lane where Homeroom never skims a gift's proceeds. Live payment is founder-gated today, so no card is charged. Card-processing fees apply to any live payment lane, ours included, and we name them here rather than bury them in a footnote you find after signing. The margin most tools quietly skim, kept in the building.
Built -- live payment held off
Enrollment, a directory, immunization and health fields, report cards, and attendance math -- a daily-driver records tier that settles no money and complements your system of record. Be clear-eyed: this is not a certified, OneRoster-certified system of record, and we never pretend it is.
Built -- complements your SIS
The part your counsel and your board care about
This is the story you hand to procurement and to the board, and it is not a promise on a slide. It is a hard rule one layer below the screens: an adviser, a student staffer, or a studio rep at one of your schools cannot see another school's students. It is proven against a real database -- a cross-school view returns zero student rows even with both schools in scope.
The single-school wall is enforced in the database, not the application, so a bug in a screen cannot leak a record across schools. It is how Homeroom is built to fit the federal student-records law -- the privacy shield you can put in front of counsel.
Live today
A parent finds their own child by a permission-checked 'find my child' student-list lookup, never a biometric face match. Facial recognition is off by default, a portrait is sellable only when permission allows, and photos are never sold.
Live today
Face matching is not wired in the shipping product and cannot be switched on from it: it holds no face-recognition model weights, and no face template is computed from a photo. Photo finding uses a permission-checked roster lookup instead. The check a procurement officer can run on any vendor, including us: ask which artifact holds the weights, and ask what a family's withdrawal actually removes. Here the answer is that there is no such artifact to name.
Live today
Federal law already requires schools to be accessible and to reach families who speak another language at home. Most vendors charge for it. Our promise: we will never charge you extra to be accessible, multilingual, safe, or compliant. Online editions read on any device by screen reader or keyboard, and PDF export carries real heading structure and alt text.
Live today
A private translation engine that runs on our own computers, translated required notices, and read-aloud in a family's language are coming -- we will not call them shipped until they are. Each school sets its main language today, English or French, with a French-first setting for Quebec.
The one page to send your district counsel before a call: the privacy and consent explainer. It says plainly what is enforced in code versus what is on the roadmap.
For the superintendent, not just the single building
A principal runs one building; a superintendent answers for all of them. The single-school wall pins an adviser, a student staffer, or a studio rep to their own school -- which is exactly what makes a district-scope roll-up safe. Signed in with district scope, you see every school you oversee in one workspace; no account below that scope can see across the wall. The cross-school view is yours because it is the only one the database allows.
The same wall that returns zero student rows to a school-level account is what makes your cross-school view legitimate. A district administrator sees the roll-up of the schools they own; a principal sees their building; an adviser sees their program. Scope is a property of the account, enforced in the database -- not a setting an adviser can widen from a screen.
Live today
See which adviser runs which publication, what is sitting in the approval queue, and who was granted access -- without laying out a single page yourself. Granting an adviser access and ending it when they leave are role changes an administrator makes from the district workspace, so access stops the day employment does. Oversight, not micromanagement.
Live today
Ad sales and fundraising roll up to a district view, so you can report what came in across the program without exporting one file per school and stapling them together. Every gift still shows that the platform never skimmed a cent of it -- card-processing fees apart, which we always name. The number you carry to the board is the number the system holds.
Live today
The board-packet and governance finalizers are built but held: they stay honest-off until they are ready, and this surface never calls them public or already in use. When they turn on you will read it here first, described plainly -- not discover it in a release note after the fact.
The district workspace is where a district or school administrator lands at sign-in. It reads across the schools you own and nothing you do not; the roll-up is scoped to your district, and no student record is ever public, indexed, or searchable outside the consent gate.
For the board packet, not just the classroom
Scholastic journalism has no single national standard with the force of Common Core, so legitimacy is assembled by crosswalk. Homeroom does that crosswalk for you and turns it into an administrator-ready alignment report: 34 live lessons, mapped across 51 states and areas, every match a checkable public code an auditor can verify.
Pick your state and get a report that reads 'this satisfies the national journalism-education framework, the matching Common Core anchors, and your-state code Z.' The evidence a program leader needs when a board asks what a yearbook class is actually teaching.
Live today
Aligning to a standard is not a credential and not automatic course credit -- and the report says so, on its face, so a school never over-claims in a board meeting. Honesty is the feature that keeps you out of an awkward correction later.
Live today
Lessons appear on the exact screen a student is working, progress is tracked, and grades pass back to the school's gradebook -- so the program is a real graded class with a record behind it, not an extracurricular with no accountability trail.
Live today
The deeper multi-level course -- middle, high, and advanced-honors tracks with week-by-week pacing -- is still coming and is labeled that way, never sold as available now.
Professional learning for the people who run schools
Not another teacher tip list. These are the leadership briefings a walkthrough covers -- the vendor-evaluation and program-governance questions a principal, a superintendent, or a district administrator actually has to answer. The administrator guide library is published, and it is on this page rather than on a roadmap: sixteen named habits across four lanes -- Board Packets and State Reporting, Compliance and Privacy Briefings, Vendor and Procurement Prep, and District Oversight Habits -- each one tied to a capability described above as built. Every briefing below names the habits in that library that answer it, so the question lands somewhere on this page before it points anywhere else.
What to look for before you sign: overprint clauses, multi-year exclusivity, who owns the photographs, how the revenue splits, and -- the question most contracts bury -- where a child's face data lives, who else can reach it, and what a vendor can actually show you when a family withdraws consent. Four of the sixteen habits below are the contract-reading ones: read the overprint clause first, confirm your own studio share, ask who keeps the fee and not the gift, and pilot one publication before districtwide. On this platform the overprint answer is that there is no overprint and no minimum order -- a late book simply prints later.
FERPA in practice, consent as a gate rather than a checkbox, and a data-retention window you can state in one sentence -- plus the questions procurement should put to any vendor, including us. The Compliance and Privacy Briefings lane below carries the four habits that make this checkable rather than merely repeatable: ask for the zero-row proof, walk the consent gate before picture day, know the retention window in one sentence, and verify accessibility is not a line item. Ask for the zero-row proof first, because it is the only claim on this page a vendor can be made to demonstrate against a real database instead of describe.
How to bring a crosswalk to a board without promising a credential the alignment does not grant. The difference between 'this aligns to' and 'this certifies' -- and why saying it plainly protects the program. The Board Packets and State Reporting lane below turns that into two habits with a deadline attached: pull the alignment report before the agenda closes, and say align, not certify, every time. The report is 34 live lessons mapped across 51 states and areas, and every match is a public code an auditor can look up without taking our word for it.
How the fundraising math works when the platform never skims a gift's proceeds, how picture-day revenue can return to the building, and how to model it honestly for a budget line -- card-processing fees included, never hidden. Three habits below carry the arithmetic: reconcile the money lanes to one number, ask who keeps the fee and not the gift, and model the funding math before the budget cycle rather than the week the number is due. Read them against the status this page states elsewhere -- the fundraising lane is built with live payment founder-gated, so no card is charged today, and the parent portrait store serves a claim-gated gallery and price list while building no cart and charging no card.
Single sign-on the way your district already logs in, a standard import from your student-information system, and no multi-year term to escape. Migrate one publication first and bring the rest when you are ready. The District Oversight Habits lane below names what a migration has to get right afterwards: check scope, not just login -- scope is a property of the account and enforced in the database, so it is not something an adviser can widen from a screen -- and end access the day employment ends. Pilot one publication before districtwide is the procurement habit that pairs with them.
What federal law already requires of a school publication, what to verify is built in versus billed as an add-on, and the free libraries you can put in front of families and staff today at no cost. The habit below is verify accessibility is not a line item, and what to verify here is specific: an online edition reads on any device by screen reader or keyboard, and a PDF export carries real heading structure and alt text -- neither is a paid add-on, and we will never charge extra to be accessible, multilingual, safe, or compliant. Pair it with bring the privacy explainer, not a summary, when one board meeting covers both.
The free, no-login libraries are real and open now: plays and scripts your students can perform at no royalty, plus curriculum and lesson-plan collections. Send them to a department head this week.
The network -- waitlist only
The best answer to a vendor question is usually another administrator who has already answered it. We are building a peer network for principals, superintendents, and district administrators to compare notes on procurement, privacy posture, budgets, and running programs. It is being built now. No posting route, no member feed, and no directory endpoint exists in the product today, and this page will never pretend one does.
Honest status: the network is not live. There is no live posting, no member feed, and no public directory today, and nothing on this page claims otherwise. The membership rule we hold ourselves to is verified school staff, who are adults; any student information stays behind the platform consent gate and is never public, indexed, or searchable. Joining the waitlist reaches a person. This site sets no cookies, uses no third-party advertising or tracking scripts, and builds no behavioral profile; basic short-lived operational logs may record page requests.
Frequently asked questions
No. The records and enrollment tier is a daily-driver that complements your system of record -- enrollment, a directory, health fields, report cards, and attendance math. It is not a certified, OneRoster-certified system of record, and we do not market it as one. Keep your SIS; use this for the program.
It is enforced in the database, one layer below the application, not in the screens. An adviser, a student staffer, or a studio rep at one of your schools cannot see another school's students. It is proven against a real database: a cross-school view returns zero student rows even when both schools are in scope. A bug in a screen cannot leak a record across schools.
By scope, enforced in the same database as the wall. A school-level account -- an adviser, a student staffer, a studio rep -- is pinned to one school, and a cross-school view returns zero student rows. A district-scope account sees the roll-up of the schools it owns and nothing outside the district. The wall is what makes the roll-up safe: the only cross-school view that exists is the one the database grants a district administrator, and no student record is ever public, indexed, or searchable outside the consent gate.
Photos are never sold, and a sale is possible only when permission allows it. Facial recognition is off by default; a parent finds their own child by a permission-checked student-list lookup, not a face match. Face matching runs only for a family that has explicitly opted in, and withdrawing that opt-in stops the matching at the gate. Face matching is not wired in the shipping product and cannot be switched on from it: it holds no face-recognition model weights, and no face template is computed from a photo. Photo finding uses a permission-checked roster lookup instead.
Yes. The alignment report is administrator-ready: 34 lessons mapped across 51 states and areas, every match a checkable public code. It is honest that aligning to a standard is not a credential or automatic course credit -- it says so on its face -- so a school never over-claims in a board meeting.
There is no multi-year contract, no minimum order, and no overprint -- a late book simply prints later. The money model is honest and code-grounded, with a cost floor so nothing sells below print cost; card-processing fees apply on the money lanes and we never hide them. Pricing lives on the pricing page, not on this front door.
Bring your student list by single sign-on -- the standard ways your district already logs in -- or a standard import from your student-information system. There is no lock-in: try one publication first and bring the rest when you are ready. You stay because the tool earns it, not because a term traps you.
No. Today this is a waitlist only -- there is no live posting, no member feed, and no public directory, and no route in the product serves one. The membership rule we hold ourselves to is verified school staff, who are adults, and student information stays behind the platform consent gate: never public, never indexed, never searchable. We would rather show you an empty room and describe it accurately than fake a community that does not exist.
The teacher runs the classroom -- lessons, the page, the deadline in the room. This surface is the building-and-district operating picture: the privacy wall you defend to counsel, the standards report you take to the board, the budget lines the money lanes feed, and procurement without lock-in. Same platform, a leader's view of it.
In the leadership resource library on this page: habits for board packets and state reporting, a compliance and privacy briefing checklist, procurement questions worth writing into an RFP, and district-oversight habits -- each grounded in a capability already described above as built, not general leadership advice. It also points to the next confirmed principals-and-administration convention dates, so an open question has somewhere real to go.
Leadership resource library · for the operating picture you already run
This is not the department-head guide library described above -- that is still being assembled, and we said so plainly rather than link something that does not exist yet. These are specific habits for running the parts of schooladministrator.network you already sign in to: what to pull before a board agenda closes, what to verify before you repeat a vendor's privacy claim, what to write into an RFP before you sign it, and how to run oversight without doing an adviser's job. Sixteen habits across four lanes, each grounded in a capability already marked Live today or Built above.
Habits for turning what the platform already proves into a packet page a board or a state auditor will actually accept.
The administrator-ready alignment report generates from the live curriculum, so pulling it a week ahead of the board meeting -- not the night before -- gives you time to read the checkable public codes yourself before a board member asks you to defend one.
The report itself is honest that an alignment is not a credential and not automatic course credit — carry that same phrasing into your own remarks. A board that hears ‘aligns to’ once and ‘certifies’ the next meeting will remember the overclaim, not the program.
Ad sales and fundraising already roll up to a district view — pull that one number into the budget narrative instead of stapling five school-level exports together. Note in the same line that a fundraising gift's proceeds are never skimmed by the platform, card-processing fees apart, so the board sees the same honest accounting you do.
When counsel or the board asks how student data is protected, hand over the actual privacy and consent explainer page rather than a paraphrase — it states plainly what is enforced in the database today versus what is still on the roadmap, so nobody has to take your word for the distinction.
What to verify yourself before you repeat a vendor's privacy claim to a family or to procurement.
The single-school wall is provable: a cross-school query against a real database returns zero student rows even with both schools in scope. That is a concrete claim you can ask to see demonstrated, not a policy statement to take on faith.
A parent finds their own child through a permission-checked lookup, and facial recognition is off by default. Explaining that sequence before the first picture-day letter goes home heads off the one question a privacy-minded family will otherwise raise after the fact.
Face matching is not wired in the shipping product and cannot be switched on from it: it holds no face-recognition model weights, and no face template is computed from a photo. Photo finding uses a permission-checked roster lookup instead. Practice saying it in exactly those terms; the distinction is the difference between an answer a family can check and a promise you would have to walk back.
Federal law already requires a school publication to be accessible and to reach families in another language; confirm up front that a platform will never bill you extra for it, and check that online editions actually read by screen reader and keyboard before you sign, not after a complaint.
Questions worth writing into the RFP before a contract is signed, not after.
Multi-year exclusivity and overprint penalties usually cost a program more than the sticker price. Ask where the photographs are owned, how revenue splits, and where a child's face data lives and what a vendor can actually show you when a family withdraws consent — the questions most picture-day contracts bury below the fold.
Single sign-on and a standard student-information-system import mean you can bring one program online first and watch it run a full cycle before deciding whether to move the rest. No multi-year term should be forcing that decision faster than you are ready to make it.
Permission-checked portraits flow into the directory and ID cards regardless of who runs the shoot, but the studio share only drops when the school runs its own picture day. Get that number in writing before the fall calendar is set, not after the photographer is already booked.
A platform can honestly say it never skims a fundraising gift's proceeds while still charging card-processing fees — ask a vendor to name that fee in dollars and cents, in writing, before you count on the full gift landing in the account.
How a superintendent or district administrator uses the roll-up without doing every adviser's job.
A district-scope account sees the roll-up of the schools it owns; a school-scope account is pinned to its own building and returns nothing across the wall. When you onboard a new hire, verify which scope they actually received — a login that works is not proof the scope is correct.
Granting and ending adviser access are role changes an administrator makes directly from the district workspace. Treat an employment change as the trigger to update access immediately — waiting for a scheduled audit is how a departed employee's access outlives their employment.
How ad sales, a no-skim fundraising lane, and a returned picture-day share add up to a budget line is worth modeling honestly — card-processing fees included — a full cycle before the number is due, so a surprise in the math never lands in the same week as the submission deadline.
A procurement or governance question that stumps your own office is often one another district has already worked through. The conventions calendar below lists the next confirmed principals-and-administration gatherings — bring the open question with you rather than guessing at an answer alone.
These are habits for capabilities already described above as Live today or Built — not new features, and not general leadership advice. For the next confirmed principals-and-administration convention dates, see the conventions calendar below.
On the conventions calendar
The next confirmed dates for Principals & Administration programs, taken directly from each organization’s official page -- nothing invented or carried forward from a prior year.
July 13-15, 2026
Orlando, FL -- Disney's Coronado Springs Resort
August 26-27, 2026
Columbia, SC -- Hilton Columbia Center, 924 Senate Street
February 6-9, 2027
Tampa, FL -- Tampa Convention Center
A walkthrough, not a funnel
Book a walkthrough and we will show you what is live today, name what reads live without a checkout, and say plainly what is honest-off. No stock testimonial, no invented metric, no school name we made up. The single-school privacy wall, the consent gate, the board-ready alignment report, and the picture-day pipeline are live now; the fundraising lane that never skims a gift's proceeds is built with live payment founder-gated today -- no card is charged; the parent portrait store serves a claim-gated gallery and price list and builds no cart, and its four-way split is a published rule rather than a transaction this page can run; the leadership network is a waitlist that posts nothing.
You run the building. The one thing you should never have to worry about is a student's record leaking -- so that is the thing we enforce in the database, not the policy binder. Come see how.
Already running Homeroom? Sign in -- a district or school administrator lands in the district workspace.