Your district's console

A district administrator runs every school beneath them, so the console asks the same questions of all of them at once. Open it from the menu behind your own picture — at the foot of the sidebar, or the top of the screen on a phone — under Console.

Schools

Every school in the district, with how many people work there and how many children are on its roll. A school's name opens that school's own console — its staff, its children and its teams — so anything a principal can do, you can do from there. Add a school is at the top; the menu beside a school has Rename.

Under the district's name is the time zone it keeps, which everyone in the district goes by: the date on an exported file or a printout, and where one day ends for Days active. Mastery Board's administrators change it if it is wrong.

Staff and children

The other two tabs are the school lists, across the district: every member of staff with their schools, teams and counts, and every child with their school, school year, classes and boards. Both sort by any column and narrow by school, so "the teachers at Longview with no class this year" is two dropdowns and a click.

Days active — how many separate days in the past 90 — is the column a district usually wants when it asks whether Mastery Board is being used. It counts separate days somebody was here rather than sign-ins, because a session here does not expire: counting sign-ins would show a 1 beside the name of a teacher who has opened it every morning since August.

Taking a list away

Export CSV on Staff and on Children saves what is on the screen as a spreadsheet — every row and column, after your search and filters, in the order you sorted them, with the count beside the button saying how many will be written. Student numbers keep any leading zeros, so a file opens in Excel still matching the system it came from.

The file is a copy of children's and staff records. Once it is on a laptop or in an email it is outside Mastery Board, so send it the way your district sends anything else about a child.

Standards

The Standards tab decides which standards your teachers are offered when they build a template. Choose the State your standards come from — every school in the district follows the same one — then tick the Grades you teach and the Subjects. Leave the ticks clear for everything the state publishes.

The subjects are the state's own words, so Tennessee says ELA where your teachers say Phonics, Reading and Writing. The tab says which board subjects each one serves, and your teachers never see the state's word for it.

Underneath, What your teachers are offered lists the state's standards grouped the way the state groups them, so you can read exactly what a teacher will see. These are Mastery Board's to keep accurate: they read the same in every district, so a report from one school still compares to another. If one is wrong, tell us.

Your district's standards are the ones you write yourselves — a pacing guide, a sight-word list, anything the state does not cover — and every school in the district is offered them beside the state's. A standard needs its words; a code is optional, so Sight Words 1-25 is a standard without having to invent one for it.

Added at your schools is what a school wrote for itself, or a teacher typed into the Template Builder when she could not find what she needed. Each stays at its own school, and you can retire one from here, or put it back. Its words are edited at that school, on its own Standards page, where the people who wrote it work.

Standards are retired, never deleted. Retiring one takes it out of the picker for new work and leaves every question already tagged with it alone, still showing its code and still printing it in the export. Put back offers it again.

If we do not hold your state's standards yet, the tab says so: your teachers see only the standards you add here, which is a perfectly good way to run, and you can ask us to load your state's at any time.

Security: two-step sign-in and the idle timeout

The Security tab holds the district's two sign-in rules. Two-step sign-in is Required for everyone unless you choose Optional for teachers: then a teacher may sign in with a password alone, or set up the code from Your profile. School and district administrators always give their code, and so does any teacher who has set one up.

Sign out after is how long a browser may sit unused before it is signed out: 1, 4, 8 or 24 hours, 7 or 30 days, or never, which is where a district starts. Two minutes before, a page left open asks Still there? with Stay signed in. Only that browser is signed out — a teacher's iPad at home keeps its own clock — and the sign-in page tells her why. Someone who works in more than one district gets the shorter timeout, and the code if either asks for it.

A change reaches everyone within five minutes, and it is recorded in the change log with who made it, and what it was before and after. Mastery Board's administrators can change it too.

Asking for a school to be deleted

Deleting a school takes its classes, its children, every mark recorded on them and the templates its teachers made, so it stays Mastery Board's to carry out. What a district administrator can do is ask: the menu beside a school has Ask to have this school deleted, which spells out what would go, asks you to type the school's name, and takes a reason.

Nothing happens when you send it. Mastery Board will be in touch first, and the administrator who sent it can withdraw it from the same page until then — only she or Mastery Board can, so a colleague who did not send it sees the option and is refused. The tick-box beside it, Close the school to its staff while the request waits, is the one part that does happen straight away: every teacher and school administrator there loses access until the request is settled or withdrawn. District administrators and Mastery Board keep theirs, which is why asking does not shut you out. Withdrawing gives each of them their place and their teams back exactly as they were — but not invitations nobody had accepted yet, which are withdrawn with the rest and have to be sent again.

Moving a child to another school in the district is a district administrator's to do, from the class's list of children. Their record goes with them; the classes they leave keep what was recorded in them.