CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi there

I write this to hear from other CiviCRM users, who works with schools, how they organize grades and classes.
I'll start and tell you how we have organised it in my organization.

In my organisation we have about 150 (member) high schools, and each school has grades (as in first, 2nd and 3rd year) and classes (usually assigned a letter eg. a, b, x or y).

To keep track of which class and grade a student is in I've chosen to use groups. So there's a group for each school, and each school group has sub groups for each grade, and each grade group has sub groups for the classes. All students are also related to their school, so I do use relationships, but not for the hierarchy of grades and classes.

Pros:
- groups support nesting
- it's easy to search
- send email to a school/grade/class
- keep track of when a student was added/removed
Cons:
- There's a lot of groups!
- unlike relationships and events, you cannot set a start and end date beforehand

So how have you done it, and why?

Is support for this kind of structuring of your contacts in civi, something you would like to see as an extension?

Interesting question. Have just come back from DrupalSouth - where Drupal in Education was a discussion (well actually Drupal in Universities) - and I came away thinking more about civi as the CRM partner to some of the use cases.

In the areas like this where we have tended to use Relationships - partly because of Eileen's work to make ACLs run off permissioned relationships - and hence a teacher can be limited to 'just' their students using the Relationship, and a 'year dean' if you have such things (ie a teacher that has a higher role across a whole year) can have access to all those year students, using a simple 'tree' model such as below

School - has relationship to - Years

Years - has relationship to - Classes

Classes - has relationship to - students

and then

Head teacher - has relationship to - school - and hence sees everyone

Form teacher - has relationship to - Years - and hence sees everyone in that year

Class teacher - has relationship to - Class(es) - and hence sees only students in their class(es)

I am not advocating you use the above, just floating it as a concept that I think can help in similar situations.

It does mean you can set end dates etc, see history, and other relationship goodies.