One page, every task.

baobab-schools.com → Sign up

1. From the apex site or any school's subdomain, choose Sign up.
2. Sign up with email + password (Clerk-hosted) — open to anyone, no invite needed.

An account by itself grants zero access to any school's data. Access only starts once you join or create one — see below.

/sign-in

1. Sign in with your email + password.
2. You land on /dashboard — if that's not a specific school's own address, or none of your schools match it, you're sent to /choose-school instead.

To sign out later: open the account menu, top-right of any signed-in page. You always land back on the main Baobab site, not whichever school's address you were on.

/choose-school

1. See every school you belong to, listed plainly — even if it's just one, so you always know what you have access to.
2. Search for another school by name from the same page; a match you already belong to opens straight to its dashboard, a match you don't belong to sends you to request access.

/onboarding

1. Search schools by name.
2. Send a request to join, with an optional note for context (e.g. "I'm the new math teacher") — this is context only, not a claimed role.
3. Wait for a staff member at that school to approve it.

The "create a new school" option only appears here for someone who already holds the dedicated permission to create schools — see Creating a school.

/onboarding → Your requests

1. After requesting to join a school, see it listed on your own Find your school page — pending, approved, or rejected — instead of just waiting silently.

baobab-schools.com/onboarding → /schools/new

1. From the main site (not a school's own address — this only works there), open Find your school and choose create a new school. Only visible if you hold the schools:create permission.
2. Fill in the school's name and country. A web address is suggested from the name — pick your own if you'd rather.
3. Optionally add an address: a plain-language landmark description works better here than a formal street address, plus a city/postal code and a map pin you place yourself.
4. Optionally set a student ID format — a short prefix and how many digits (e.g. STU-00001).
5. Optionally start your level catalog (Grade 1, Form 3, whatever your system calls them) from one of 19 ready-made regional presets, or start blank and add levels later.
6. Submit — you land straight on your new school's own dashboard, with full access to it.

This isn't open to every signed-in user. Creating a school requires a dedicated permission that a platform administrator grants — ask one if you don't see the option.

/dashboard/settings

1. Edit the school's address (landmark description, city, postal code, map pin) any time after creation.
2. Switch the parent & guardian portal on or off.

These two are all that a school edits about itself. Its name, country, currency, student ID format, term structure and grading scale are managed by Baobab — changing them after a year has started re-labels amounts and marks that were already issued, so ask support. The school's web address (its subdomain) can't be changed by anyone: renaming it would break every bookmark and login link pointing at it, so get it right at creation.

/platform/schools/[id]/settings → General

1. Ask Baobab support to correct the school's name or country. A platform administrator edits it; the school cannot.

The web address (subdomain) still isn't editable by anyone — see the note above.

/platform/schools/[id]/settings

1. Ask Baobab support to adjust what the school marks out of, its pass mark, how many decimals a bulletin prints, and the appreciations printed beside a mark.
2. Term structure (semesters or trimesters) is changed the same way.

Not editable by the school on purpose: the grading scale moves every mark, term result, bulletin and published parent-portal figure at once.

/dashboard/requests

1. See everyone currently asking to join your school, with their note if they left one.
2. Approve, picking a starting access level — Full access, Manage academic + students, View students only, or grant nothing yet — or reject.

The preset is just a starting point. Fine-tune exactly what someone can do afterward on the permissions page below.

/dashboard/staff

1. See everyone with access to your school.
2. Remove someone's access — this is reversible; if they rejoin later, permissions can be re-granted.

"Manage permissions" next to a specific person jumps straight to the permissions page with that person already selected — you don't need to re-find them in the list there.

/dashboard/staff/permissions

1. Pick a person and exactly what they can do — staff & permissions, academic management, managing students, viewing students, fees, treasury, payroll, or grades.
2. Apply it school-wide, or scope it to just one classroom or one student.
3. Revoke it later the same way.

There's no fixed title like "admin" or "teacher" here — every ability is its own switch, and you can never hand out more than you hold yourself.

/dashboard/staff/permissions → Manage gradable items & grades → Course

1. When granting grade-entry access, the scope picker offers Course alongside Classroom and Student — choose a specific course within a classroom instead of the whole classroom.

Course scoping is only offered for grade-entry access — every other permission still scopes to a Classroom or Student.

/dashboard/students → New

• optional Student ID (auto-filled)
• First name
• optional Middle name
• Last name
• Date of birth
• optional Guardian name
• optional Guardian email
• optional Guardian phone

Guardian email is optional, but a student without one is flagged on the roster — without it, that family can't use the parent portal below. This same form also opens from a classroom's roster (see Add a classroom, place students, assign teachers) when a search there turns up no match — finishing it there lands you back on that roster, ready to enroll the student you just created.

/dashboard/students

1. Search and browse the active roster; view-only access can look but not edit.
2. Edit any student's details, including guardian contact info.
3. Archive a student who's left — this hides them from the active list without deleting their record, and can be undone.

/dashboard/students → Show archived students

1. From the student list, choose Show archived students to switch to a view of everyone who's been archived, with the same search and pagination as the active roster.
2. Restore one back onto the active roster; view-only access can browse but not restore.

/dashboard/academic

1. Open Academic Management from the dashboard — you land straight on this year's classroom list, nothing to pick first.
2. Open any classroom to see and manage it.

Academic → a classroom

1. Create a classroom under the current year (an "Add a classroom" button sits right on the Academic hub, alongside course management, whether or not the year has any classrooms yet) and give it a level (e.g. "Grade 6").
2. Open its Students tab to place students into it for the year. Searching there finds any student not yet enrolled this year; if there's no match, "create student" takes you to Add a student and back again once saved.
3. Open its Teachers tab to assign a staff member to a course for a given term.

Assigning someone as a classroom's teacher is a roster note, not a permission by itself — they still need grade-entry access granted separately (see Staff & permissions).

/dashboard/academic/courses · Academic → Manage levels (/dashboard/academic/levels)

1. Keep one reusable list of subjects for the school, and choose which are offered in each classroom.
2. Keep one list of levels (Grade 1, Form 3, …), each with a position that later suggests promotion order — added from the same 19-preset regional list, not typed freehand (you can rename or reorder one you've added). Levels live under Academic → Year setup, alongside school years and courses.

Academic → School year administration → /dashboard/academic/years

1. Create a school year with a label and start/end dates, and mark one as current.
2. Define its terms (e.g. Term 1, Term 2), which grading is organized around.

Deliberately tucked away from the everyday flow above — this is a once-a-year setup task, not something you should need to think about while doing day-to-day academic work.

/dashboard/my-classes

1. Sign in — if you hold grade-entry access but not full academic management, the dashboard shows a My classes card instead of (or alongside) Academic Management.
2. Open it to see every classroom you can grade in the current school year, regardless of whether your access was granted school-wide or to that one classroom specifically.
3. Click a classroom to go straight to its grade-entry page — no detour through the rest of academic management.

Before this existed, someone granted only grade-entry access saw no dashboard cards at all — nothing pointed them to their classroom's grades page except a direct link someone handed them. This doesn't yet filter by which course you were assigned to teach (see Grant grading access per course) — it shows every classroom your grant covers.

Classroom → Manage grades

1. Open a classroom's Manage grades page — reachable even by someone who holds only grade-entry access, not full academic management.
2. Add a gradable item for a course and term — a quiz, homework, or exam — with a name, a weight, and its own max score.

Classroom → Manage grades

1. Enter each student's score for a gradable item in the grid.
2. Leave a cell blank for "not graded yet."
3. Watch each student's weighted average update live — the exact number a guardian will later see for that course.

A blank cell means "not graded yet" — use the status dropdown next to each score to mark a genuinely missed assessment instead. See Mark a grade absent or excused.

Classroom → Manage grades

1. In the grade-entry grid, each score has a status dropdown next to it — mark a cell Absent or Excused instead of leaving it blank (this also disables and clears that cell's score field).
2. Absent counts against the average the way a genuine zero would; Excused is left out of it, the way "not graded yet" is.

{your-school}.baobab-schools.com/parent-portal

1. Enter the student's ID number and date of birth.
2. If it matches, a one-time code is emailed to the guardian address on file — enter it to continue.
3. See the student's name and classroom, and each course's grade for the current school year, for one hour.

The lookup gives the same reply whether or not it matched, so it can't be used to guess whether a given ID exists. A match also requires the student to be placed in a classroom for the current school year and to have a guardian email on file — if a family's email is out of date or missing, or the student hasn't been placed yet, ask the school to fix it (see Students and Academic structure above).

/dashboard/settings → Parent & guardian portal

1. From School Settings, switch the parent portal off entirely for schools that aren't ready for email-based access yet — visiting it then shows the same not-found page as an unrecognized address, with no separate messaging.

/platform/schools · /platform/schools/[id]

1. See every school on the platform — name, address, country, and staff count.
2. Open one to see its staff roster and pending join requests. Read-only for now — no changes from here yet.

/platform/permissions

1. Grant or revoke any permission — including the ability to create new schools — across every school at once, for a trusted person.

You'll need the person's Clerk user ID (found in the Clerk dashboard) — there's no name search here yet. The very first platform administrator is set up by whoever runs the server, once; every admin after that is added by an existing one through this page. This is the single highest-blast-radius action in Baobab — it reaches every school at once — so treat that Clerk user ID lookup as a deliberate speed bump, not just friction to route around.