Family Account and School Schedule

Administration
1

Hi, i wasn’t sure where to ask this, but I think i’m in the right area. I’m from a nonprofit music school, and sometimes our families will have more than one student learning an instrument (or multiple) with us. Even parents will take private lessons, and also volunteer for events/activities. I went over the Training Day videos on the YT channel, and have several questions.

  • Our current setup is there are only admin, teacher, and student accounts that are tied to parents’ emails. If the parents want to take lessons, they have to create a separate account, which is inconvenient not to have everything on one account and easily accessible. I know it’s possible to group/connect multiple accounts to show they’re a family, but is it possible for just one account to have/list multiple individuals, and for each individual to be selected for a class/event/activity?
  • For volunteer parents, everything is done manually, and no information is online - for example, if one parent signs up for duties on day B, admin#1 writes it down, and another parent signs up for same duties on day B, admin#2 writes it down, but the information is only written down on paper, and not conveyed to everyone easily. Can parents sign up for volunteer event/activities if the admin sets it up properly on Gibbon? (this is also assuming if the family is all under one account)

My last question is in regards to the school schedule - we hold our classes on certain days of the week (ex: Wed-Thur), but we will sometimes have offcampus events/performances on other days (ex: Mon or Sat). I know we can go to “Manage Days of the Week”, and turn off the days we don’t have class, but would this affect any events we hold that are not during school days? Would we be unable to put an event on the calendar if we turn that particular weekday “off”?

Thank you in advance!

2

Hi @musicll, welcome to the Gibbon forums.

Gibbon can be quite flexible, with many different settings and modules to help a school adapt it to their needs. However, since it was designed with more traditional schooling in mind, there is some built-in functionality like families that cannot be turned off, and there is no other way to connect user accounts without using a family.

For volunteering parents, there isn’t quite a way for them to sign themselves up for Activities, however they can be added by admin. Parents can also be added to Classes and also as guests to Lesson Plans, depending on which parts of the system you plan to use.

For days of the week, if you disable a day of the week, it will disappear entirely from the timetable and other areas of the system. You can keep it enabled and opt to not timetable those days, in which they will show up blank. You could also create a special “Off Timetable” day structure (timetable column + timetable day) and assign it to those dates through Timetable Admin > Tie Days to Dates, enabling you to have a different schedule for those days.

Hope this helps get you up and running. There are some other music schools that have been using Gibbon, perhaps search the forums and see what other creative solutions they’ve come up with for their cases. Cheers!