What this helps you do
This is the boundary the whole product sits on, and it is short. The Hub holds adults and the audiences they are in. It holds no student record, no parent-child relationship, no enrolment, attendance, grade, assignment, timetable, class list, bus route membership, lunch balance or medical detail, and it has no connector to a student information system, a learning platform or a parent portal. Everything that looks like school structure here — Lower School, Grade 5, Room 12, Bus Route 4, Varsity Soccer — is a list a person at your school created by name and filled, or an interest a parent chose. Your school knows who a change affects. This is where you say so.
When to use it
Read this before the first send, and again whenever anyone proposes that the Hub should know something: that a student was absent, that a grade changed, that a route was reassigned, that a form is outstanding, or that one parent rather than another should receive something.
How to do it
- Treat every audience as a list you maintain. When a child changes class, team or route, somebody moves the adult; nothing moves on its own.
- Keep student-level facts out of message bodies where you can, and out of the Hub entirely as data. Send what the adult needs to act on.
- Use household grouping only as a delivery convenience. Grouping two adults means a send marked One per household reaches one of them on Blasts instead of both; anyone on email still gets their own copy. It records no child, no custody arrangement and no decision about who may receive school information; your own systems and processes decide that, exactly as they did before.
- Never treat a message as proof anyone saw it, and never assume one guardian speaks for the other. When you need an answer from an adult, ask for a YES / NO reply, which is their own words.
- Keep student data out of every import. Each row is one adult; a column headed birthday, DOB or date of birth is read as that adult's own birthday, so never include a student's date of birth. A school's preferences page does not ask for a birthday or an anniversary, and a school has no need to send either message.
- Keep every required notice where it goes now. Attendance letters, official notification and anything that has to be retained belong in the systems and processes that already carry them.
- Write in the languages your families read. Parents and guardians choose their own interface language, but the Hub does not translate what you write; if a message needs to go out in two languages, write it in two languages.
- Check anything that touches student records or privacy obligations with your own counsel and your district's policy. This product asserts no conformance with any standard or statute, and makes no FERPA or COPPA claim.
Example
A grade lead wants families of children with an outstanding permission form to get a private nudge. The Hub cannot do that, because it does not know which form belongs to which child or which adult. What the school does instead: the office checks the forms in the system that holds them, and either sends one message to Grade 5 saying the form is due, or writes to the handful of adults individually in Conversations. The school did the knowing; the Hub did the reaching.
Good to know
- The Hub is not a student information system, a learning platform, a parent portal, an attendance system, a legal-notice system or an emergency notification system.
- No FERPA or COPPA claim is made for this channel, and nothing here satisfies a statutory notice, records-retention or accessibility obligation.
- Nothing here is proof that an adult was notified, and nothing records an acknowledgement other than a reply the adult sent.
- Everyone here is an adult who agreed to be. They can change what they hear about or reply STOP at any time, and people on Blasts can mute or disconnect there.
- Nothing here is a retention system: Blasts auto-delete in the Blasts app after 30 days, and email copies sit in inboxes like any email. If a message has to be retained, keep the copy in your records system.
- Bus route and team audiences carry no location or roster data of any kind. The Hub has no bus location, no live tracking and no arrival time; a person sends what the transportation office told them.