Education · App Starter
Student Information System Template
Gradebook, attendance, report cards, and a parent portal — a working SIS generated into code your school controls.
District-scale student systems are priced, sized, and locked down for districts. This starter generates the SIS a single school actually needs — enrollment, daily attendance, a gradebook that produces report cards, and a portal guardians can log into — as an application your school runs itself, with student records in a database you hold.
- 6 core entities
- Parent portal
- Code you own
- Vibe + Governed modes
01 · Data model
What's inside: the data model
Six tables model the school year. They're deliberately conventional — any registrar would recognize the shape — which is what makes report cards, transcripts, and state reports derivable from them rather than a separate product tier.
| table | what it holds |
|---|---|
students | The permanent record's spine: demographics, grade level, enrollment status, and links to guardians, classes, and marks. |
guardians | Parents and caregivers with contact details, custody and pickup flags, and portal credentials — one guardian can span siblings. |
classes | Sections with teacher, subject, term, room, and meeting schedule — the unit attendance and grades hang from. |
enrollments | Which student sits in which class for which term, with add and drop dates so mid-year moves don't corrupt history. |
attendance_records | One row per student per class meeting — present, absent, tardy, excused — timestamped and attributable to the teacher who took it. |
grades | Scores on assignments and assessments, weighted by category, rolling up to term marks and the report card. |
02 · Screens
Signature modules
Gradebook
01Teachers enter scores against assignments grouped into weighted categories — homework, quizzes, exams — and term averages compute live. The weighting scheme is your school's policy expressed in code, so a standards-based or narrative model is a change you can make, not a product you can't buy.
Attendance
02Homeroom or per-period, a teacher takes attendance in under a minute from a class roster screen. Patterns surface automatically: a student crossing an absence threshold appears on the front-office list the same morning, while the record itself stays audit-ready for compliance reporting.
Report cards
03Term marks, attendance summaries, and teacher comments assemble into printable report cards generated straight from the live tables. No export-to-spreadsheet ritual at the end of each term — the report card is a view of data the school already keeps.
Parent portal
04Guardians sign in to see their own children's grades, attendance, and announcements — scoped strictly by the guardian link, including split-custody arrangements. The awkward phone calls about a missing assignment become a screen the family already checked.
03 · Process
How it works
- 1You
Describe your school
Grade levels, term structure, grading scale, attendance style — tell Dual7 how your school actually operates. A semester-based middle school and a trimester Montessori program get different configurations of the same bones.
- 2Vibe mode
Tune it in Vibe mode
Work with the running system conversationally: add a behavior-note field, change the tardy policy, put your letterhead on the report card. Each adjustment lands as reviewable code.
- 3Governed mode
Go live through the governed pipeline
Deploy onto infrastructure your school chooses, through approval gates with a full audit trail. Student records never transit a vendor's cloud on the way to yours.
04 · Fit
Who the Student Information System starter is for
Small private schools priced out of district software
The big student systems quote per-student annual fees that assume a district office is paying. A 200-student school gets the same core needs — enrollment, attendance, grades, portal — from a generated app whose cost doesn't multiply by headcount.
Charter and micro-schools with a model that doesn't fit
Mastery-based progression, mixed-age cohorts, narrative evaluations — the pedagogies these schools exist for are precisely what off-the-shelf gradebooks can't represent. When the grading model is your own code, the software follows the pedagogy instead of vetoing it.
Supplemental academies and weekend programs
Language schools, religious schools, and enrichment academies need real rosters, attendance, and progress reports a few hours a week — a footprint no full-time SIS prices sanely. This starter scales down honestly because there's no license floor beneath it.
School operators who answer to auditors
Accreditation reviews and state audits ask for attendance histories and grade-change trails on demand. A system whose records sit in your own database — with every change attributable — turns those requests from panic into a query.
05 · Yours
Customize it, own it
Make it yours
Schools differ in exactly the places vendors standardize. Add the fields your enrollment actually tracks — allergies, bus route, scholarship status, sacrament records for a parochial school. Reshape terms into trimesters or quarters. Swap the A–F scale for standards-based proficiency bands, and the gradebook, report card, and portal all follow, because they read from the same schema you just changed.
Beyond fields, whole capabilities graft on cleanly: a billing module tied to enrollments for tuition, a health-office log, state-format attendance exports, or an admissions pipeline feeding the students table. The generated system is an ordinary full-stack application with no runtime tie to Dual7, so a local developer — or Vibe mode — can keep evolving it for as long as the school exists.
Why a starter, not a subscription
Student data is the strongest ownership argument on this site. Grades, attendance, and family contact details are records a school is legally and ethically obliged to protect — and with a generated system they live in a database the school holds, under access rules the school can read as code. FERPA conversations get simpler when the answer to 'where is the data?' is a server you administer.
There's also a continuity argument: schools outlive software vendors. A subscription SIS that sunsets or triples its price forces a migration in the middle of a school year. Code you own has no sunset date — the worst case is maintenance, which the governed pipeline keeps orderly with gated changes and an audit trail.
Student Information System template — frequently asked questions
What comes with the student information system starter?
A working SIS in code your school owns: students, guardians, classes, enrollments, attendance_records, and grades, plus a teacher gradebook, daily attendance screens, generated report cards, and a guardian portal scoped per family.
Can it handle our grading scale and term structure?
Yes — scale and terms are configuration you describe up front and code you can change later. Letter grades, percentages, standards-based bands, semesters, trimesters, or a custom academy calendar all fit, because the rollup logic is yours to edit.
How does the parent portal handle split custody?
Access flows through the guardian-student link, which carries custody and contact flags per relationship. Each guardian sees exactly the children they're linked to, and a restricted guardian can be limited or removed without touching the student record.
Is it appropriate for FERPA-covered records?
The architecture helps: records live in your database, on your infrastructure, behind role-based access you control in code, with attributable change history. Compliance is ultimately about your practices, but you're not adding a third-party processor to your data map.
Can we import students from our current system?
The schema is standard relational tables, so an import is a script over your current system's export — students, guardians, then enrollments. Historical grades can load into past terms so transcripts stay continuous across the switch.
Does it produce transcripts and state reports?
Report cards ship in the starter; transcripts and state-format exports are derivations of the same grades and attendance tables, typically added in Vibe mode against your state's spec. Since you own the queries, next year's format change is an edit, not a support ticket.
Related
Dual7 App Starters
Build your Student Information System on your terms
Gradebook, attendance, report cards, and a parent portal — a working SIS generated into code your school controls. Describe your version to start — the output is a project you own.