Managing Members & Roles

Every person in your co-op has one primary role. Roles control what they can see and do inside the app:

Most families and first-time teachers come in through your join link and an application. A separate Invite tool on Admin › Members lets you add someone directly — Admin, Teacher, or Family — and skip the queue.

The Members list itself shows each person’s photo or initials, name, role, and how long ago they last used HomeschoolGo, so you can spot an account that’s never signed in at a glance. Use the search box to find someone by name or email, the role and status filters to narrow the list (for example, everyone who’s never signed in), and the sort control to order by role, name, join date, or last active.

A third way records land in your roster is a CSV import of your old records. On Admin › Settings, the Import tab walks you through uploading an export from Homeschool-Life.com yourself: a preview screen shows how many families and students it found before anything is created, and a family already on file (matched by email) is skipped automatically rather than duplicated. Those families show up in the directory right away, but each one carries a Not yet activated badge until a parent signs in and goes through their term’s Confirm your information review. That first sign-in is what turns an imported record into a fully active member. The badge is informational only and doesn’t restrict anything the family can do once they sign in.

An import creates the record but doesn’t email anyone, so a family only finds their way in if they use your join link themselves or you send them one. Whenever any imported families haven’t claimed their account yet, the same Import tab shows an Imported families not set up yet card listing them, with a search box and a Select all option so you can send the setup link to one family or all of them at once. A family who signed in but stopped partway through gets a reminder to finish instead of a repeat invitation.

Reviewing applications: Go to Admin › Applications. Use the search bar to find a specific applicant by name or email. Pending applications are listed first; the ones you’ve already acted on sit in a Reviewed section underneath, which has its own status filter (Approved or Rejected). Each row shows the applicant’s answers, any waivers they signed, and their students’ information — click a row to open the full application. Long answers are collapsible so the review page stays readable. If any of your custom questions has a fixed set of answers (a dropdown, checkboxes), an Answer summary panel next to the queue tallies how the applicants in view answered each one. Click a count to filter the queue to just those applicants. Approve & invite creates their account and sends an invitation email. For someone new to HomeschoolGo, the email’s setup link works once. If they open it after it has expired or been used, they can click Email me a new link on the page they land on, and a fresh one goes to the address on their application, so they don’t need to ask you for another. Reject closes the application without creating an account — they can reapply through the join link if circumstances change. Check the boxes on multiple pending applications (or use Select all) to approve or reject them together from the bulk action bar instead of reviewing one at a time.

If a listed child’s name matches a student already on file under a different family, the application shows a Possible duplicate household warning naming that existing family before you approve. It usually means a spouse or co-parent applied separately instead of using the household invite below. Approving still works, but see Household member invites or Merging duplicate families below if the two records should really be one.

Families can link a spouse, co-parent, or guardian into their own household without any admin involvement. On My Profile, the Household Members card has an Invite a household member button — they enter the other person’s email and pick a relationship, and HomeschoolGo handles the rest:

• If the email has never signed up, it sends an invite that lands the new person in the same family, seeing the same students.
• If the email already has a HomeschoolGo account with no family in your co-op yet (a teacher-only login, for example), it links them in directly — no invite step.
• If the email already belongs to someone with their own separate family record in your co-op, the invite is refused — that household is already split across two records. An owner or admin can join them with the merge tool below; because it moves students, payments, and registrations one way, it stays out of the self-serve flow.

A newly invited member shows a Can sign in badge in the Household Members list. If the invite email never arrived, a Resend invite link appears next to their name until they sign in for the first time — click it to send a fresh setup link. The invited person can also get a new link on their own: opening an expired invite link takes them to a page with an Email me a new link button.

Household members can set the name shown for them across the co-op, so it doesn’t have to match their email address or the name on their account. In the Household Members list, click the pencil next to your own name — everyone can only edit their own, not anyone else’s.

The one exception is the family’s primary contact, who won’t see a pencil. Their name comes from the primary contact fields in Family Information, which already update everywhere the name appears — editing it there is the single place to change it.

When one household ends up on two family records — usually two parents who each signed up instead of one inviting the other — an owner or an admin with the Manage members permission can combine them into one. The Members page flags likely duplicates (families that share an email, phone, or name) in a Possible duplicate families card.

Spouses or co-parents who each signed up under different names and separate contact info (so nothing matches automatically) won’t show up in that card. Use the Merge two families search box just below it instead — look up each record by name or email and it opens the same review-and-merge screen.

Open a member’s record in Admin › Members and use the Role section to make changes. This is owner-only by default, but an owner can hand it to a specific admin — see Change member roles under Admin permission levels below.

When someone has the Admin role, you can scope their access to specific parts of the app. This lets you delegate work without handing over full control.

Find the admin on Admin › Members, open their Member actions menu, and choose Edit permissions. The available permissions are:

Owners always have full access regardless of any permission settings, and the permissions above apply to the Admin role only. Editing another admin’s permissions is always owner-only, even for an admin with Change member roles turned on.

Two permissions sit outside that list. Manage gallery can be granted to a member on any role, including a family or a teacher, so the person who actually takes the photos can run Community › Gallery without being made an admin. Grant it in Admin › Members from that member’s “…” menu, which offers Allow gallery management (and Remove gallery access to take it back). It lets them create albums and upload, caption and delete photos, and nothing else.

Send email blasts works the same way, from the same menu, with Allow email blasts (and Remove email blast access to take it back). Use it for the volunteer who writes your newsletter: they can compose, schedule and send email blasts, and see what the co-op has already sent, without becoming an admin. An Email Blasts page appears in their sidebar, and an Email blasts pill appears next to their name on the Members page. It covers email only. Texting stays with admins, because it spends the SMS credits your co-op has bought.

Guardians can add a birthday to their profile, with the year being optional. This gives admins a heads-up to recognize community members on their birthday.

To add yours, go to My Profile and look for the birthday field in the personal information section. Enter the month and day — or month, day, and year if you want to share the full date.

Admins see a birthday count pill at the top of the Families page. Click it to open a list of everyone — guardians and students alike — with a birthday coming up in the next 30 days. It doesn’t require the year to be set — it just needs a month and day to work.

When you need to answer “has this family actually completed everything?”, open Admin › Members, find someone in the family, open their Member actions menu and choose View membership record. The page collects what the family has on file across every term they’ve been with you:

• Term reviews — each term the family confirmed their information for, and the date they did it
• Signed waivers — every waiver the family has signed, with who signed and when. Waivers signed as part of a membership application are marked With application, and a Declined badge shows where a waiver was one the family could decline
• Enrollment fees — the join fee charged for each term, the amount, and whether it’s paid or still pending

Any applications the family submitted are listed below those cards, with the answers they gave and the waivers they signed at application time inside each one.

Some teachers were approved before they had a household on file. When a household is set up for one of them later, either by the teacher with Set up my family on their profile or by you with Add as a household on the Members page, their approved application is attached to it. The match is on email, so it works when the application was sent from the same address they sign in with. The phone, address and waivers from that application then show on the family’s record.

Co-ops that meet in a church hall, carry their own insurance, or answer to a diocese are often required to hold something on file for every adult who is around the children: a background check, safeguarding training, CPR, a first aid certificate. Most co-ops have been keeping that in a spreadsheet alongside HomeschoolGo, which works until somebody has to say who has lapsed.

Go to Settings › Families to define the kinds of certification your co-op tracks. Each one has a name, instructions you can format properly (a link to the training provider, what a completed check needs to show), how often it has to be renewed, and whether it applies to every adult or only to some.

Records are kept per adult rather than per household, because the question being asked is which person lapsed, not which family. An adult who is not yet on the family’s roster can still be recorded by name, so a half-finished directory never stops you entering a date.

The everyday tool for taking away a member’s access is reversible: Suspend, on a member’s record in Admin › Members (open their Member actions menu and choose Suspend member). A suspended member can still sign in to HomeschoolGo — suspending doesn’t lock their account — but instead of reaching your co-op’s dashboard they land on a page telling them their membership is paused, and they’re hidden from the Families page. Their record, enrollments, and payment history stay intact the whole time. Click Reactivate on the same record at any time to restore them.

Suspend is reversible and keeps everything intact, so it’s the right first move even for a family that’s leaving for good. It keeps their history in your ledger without giving them access. If you need to erase a family’s records entirely rather than just lock them out, see Permanently deleting a family below.

Only the owner sees the Suspend option, even for an admin with the Manage members permission. If an admin needs to suspend someone, ask the owner to do it or to transfer ownership to them.

Some entries should go entirely: a test account, or an invite sent to the wrong address. For a member with no household in your co-op, suspend them first. Their Member actions menu then shows Remove from co-op… under Reactivate. Type their name, tick the box to confirm, and their membership is deleted. They drop off the Members list and can no longer reach your co-op. This can’t be undone, though you can invite them again later, and they keep their HomeschoolGo login and any other co-ops they belong to. Someone still assigned to a class has to be taken off it first.

A member who has a household isn’t removed this way. Their menu points you to the Families page, where you delete the family instead (see Permanently deleting a family below).

For the rare case where a family’s records need to be erased outright (a duplicate created by mistake, an unclaimed import, or a formal deletion request), you can permanently delete a family from Families. Open the family, click Edit, and look for the Danger zone at the bottom of the panel. This is separate from Suspend and cannot be undone.

Deletion is only offered once a family is already withdrawn, so you always meet the reversible option first. Before you can delete, you’ll type the family’s own name to confirm and, if they have payment history, explicitly acknowledge it.

The Families page answers two different questions with two different badges, and it helps to keep them straight. Registered and Accepted are about the registration fee: Registered means the fee is paid and the family’s spot is secured, while Accepted means you have accepted them but the fee is still outstanding. Enrolled is about classes: at least one child in the household is enrolled in a class for the current term. A family can be Registered without being Enrolled — they have paid but haven’t picked classes yet — and a teacher whose fee you waived can be Enrolled without ever showing Registered. Hovering over any badge shows what it means.

A count above the list reads something like “18 registered, 3 awaiting payment,” and a Registration filter pulls up just one group, which is useful when you want to email everyone who still owes. Once enrollment opens, a Classes filter does the same for enrollment — “Not enrolled in classes” is the list of families to nudge about signing their children up.

The Registered badge reads the registration fee charge on a family’s ledger, so it appears on its own once a family has been charged. If your co-op collects the fee automatically when an application is approved, it is already there. If you collect it some other way and want the same visibility, charge it by hand: go to Admin › Billing, click Charge family, and pick Registration fee as the type. That type is what the badge and the filter read, so Dues or Custom will not show up here.

A co-op that doesn’t charge a registration fee sees none of the fee badges. No Registered or Accepted badge, no Registration filter, no count — the Enrolled badge still appears on its own once families start enrolling in classes.

Adding a household by hand

Most families arrive through the join link. For the one who signs up at a table on a co-op day, or over the phone, the Families page has an Add family button. Enter the household’s details and as many children as you need, and save.

The record is created the same way an imported one is, which means it behaves the same way afterwards: it shows as unclaimed until you invite the parent and they sign in and take it over, and everything you have already typed is waiting for them when they do. A student row with only some of its fields filled in is refused rather than saved half-blank, so you find out at the point of typing rather than weeks later.

A short label on a family

Sometimes you want a word or two on a household that the family’s own description is too long for: a board member, a first-year family, whoever hosts the nursery. Edit a family from the Families page and fill in its Directory label.

Where labels appear is a separate decision, under Families view settings on the same page: on the cards, in the table, or nowhere. They are off until you turn them on, so a family with a label typed in shows nothing until you choose where labels go. A family without one looks exactly as it always did.

Correcting a student’s details

A birthdate typed wrong, or an allergy a parent mentioned to you in the hall, used to mean asking that family to sign in and fix it themselves. Open a family from the Families page and each child has an Edit button of their own.

It opens the same fields the family sees on their own children: first and last name, birthdate, grade, the student’s email and phone, an emergency contact name and phone, and free-text boxes for allergies, medical notes or special needs, and dietary restrictions. Save and the change is theirs too, so nothing has to be repeated back to them.

Admin › Students is the student-by-student counterpart to the Families page: one flat list of every child across every active family, with their grade, their household, and the classes they are in for the term you have selected. It includes children who aren’t enrolled in anything, which the Emergency Roster cannot show you because that one is built from class rosters. Those are usually the children you are looking for when something has been missed.

Each row also shows the child’s age, counted from the birthdate on file against your co-op’s own calendar day. A child with no birthdate recorded shows a dash there, the same as grade already does.

Search by student name, family name, grade, or class. The filters narrow to a grade, an age range (under 5, 5 to 8, 9 to 12, 13 to 17, 18 and up, or no age on file), a single class, students not enrolled in anything, or students with an allergy, medical note, or dietary restriction on file. A row of counts across the top does the same in one click. The sort menu orders the list by age as well as by grade, and Download CSV exports whatever the current term’s list contains.

Changing what a student is enrolled in

Click a student’s name to open their own page, which lists the classes they hold for the selected term. Remove next to a class takes them out of it, and Add to a class underneath puts them into another one, so a mid-term swap is two clicks in one place rather than a trip through two rosters.

Removing a class here does not refund anything. If money changed hands and needs to go back, unenroll from the class roster instead, where you are offered the refund at the same time.

Support profiles

Settings › Families › Support profiles adds an optional profile a parent can fill in for each child, describing how that child participates best: movement and sensory needs, transitions, how they take in instructions, what helps when they’re overwhelmed, what motivates them, and an open “Learning & participation” note for anything else an instructor should know. It’s off until you turn it on, and nobody is ever required to fill one in.

With it on, applicants are also asked on your public join form. Each child there gets a Support & accommodations question offering three answers: no additional details, add details now, or a preference to discuss it with the coordinator. Details given there become that child’s support profile when you approve the application, and a request to discuss it is flagged for you on the application itself so somebody follows up.

With it on, a shared profile shows on the Roster tab of the class in Teaching, behind a Support profile badge next to the student’s name. Only the teachers of classes that child is currently enrolled in can open it, plus you and your other admins. Other families never see it, and it stays out of the directory and every export. If you turn the setting back off, the profiles stop being shown to anyone.

It earns its keep at a co-op teaching learners with a range of support needs, where the alternative is each parent repeating the same briefing to every new teacher. Families read their side of it in the Academic Progress guide.

On Admin › Settings (Programs area), the Teacher permissions card decides what a teacher can do on their own without asking an admin. All four settings start off, and each one applies to every teacher at once. They are co-op-wide switches rather than per-person permissions, which is why they live on Settings and not on a member’s own record.

“Teacher” here means anyone assigned to teach a class at your co-op, not only members whose role is set to Teacher. Most co-ops leave a parent who teaches one class on the Family role, so reading these settings strictly by role would skip most of the people actually teaching. The settings about a teacher’s own classes follow the class assignment, so assigning someone to a class is what grants them, and unassigning takes it back. See all class rosters reaches anyone who teaches here as well as anyone holding the Teacher role.

See all class rosters. By default a teacher only sees rosters for the classes they’re assigned to teach. Turning this on opens every class roster to every teacher and lets them take attendance for any class, which helps with substitute coverage or a small co-op where teachers cover for each other.

Edit the description, icon & color of their own classes. Lets a teacher change what families see for a class they’re assigned to: the description on the class catalog, and the small icon and color shown next to the class name. Their class page in Teaching gains a Settings tab with a Class details card. They click Edit, make their changes, and click Save. The title, capacity, fee, room, time slot, and status stay with owners and admins.

Manage the waitlist for their own classes. Adds a Waitlist tab to the teacher’s class page, listing who is waiting in the order they would be promoted. The teacher can promote a student into an open seat from there. Promoting bills that family for the class fee exactly as it does when an admin promotes, so turn this on only if you’re comfortable with a teacher creating a charge.

Email the families in their own classes. Adds an Updates tab to the teacher’s class page, where they can send a one-way email to the families of students in the classes they teach. See the class updates guide for how sending works.

From their Roster tab in Teaching, a teacher can click Download CSV to export their class’s roster — name, grade, allergies, dietary restrictions, and medical notes, plus parent contact info if they have permission to see it — for printing or sharing outside the app.

Bulk selection lives on the Families page, not on Admin › Members — that page manages roles and permissions one person at a time. To reach a specific group of families:

For charging a group of families the same amount — semester dues, a late fee — use the Bulk invoice button on Admin › Billing instead; it charges every family in the co-op the same amount in one step and skips anyone already charged the same description this term.

A teacher wants to also enroll their own children. Do they need two accounts?

No. They can set this up themselves — no admin action needed. Have them open My Profile and click the Set up your family card, then add their children. Their family shows up on the Families page automatically and their teacher role is unaffected.

A family applied but I can’t find them in the application queue.

Check whether the application was already acted on — approved or rejected. Admin › Applications lists pending applications at the top and keeps reviewed ones in a Reviewed section below them. Click that heading to open it if it’s closed, then use its status filter to show only approved or only rejected applications.

I suspended a family by mistake. Can I undo it?

Yes — suspension is fully reversible. Open their record in Admin › Members and click Reactivate. Nothing was deleted while they were suspended, so their profile, enrollments, and payment history come back exactly as they were.

Can I see which admin made a specific change?

Yes. Go to Admin › Settings and open the Audit log tab (owners only). Every significant admin action is recorded with the person’s name, what they changed, and when.

Can I see every application a family has ever submitted, not just their most recent one?

Yes. Open a family’s row on Admin › Members, open their Member actions menu, and choose View applications. It lists every membership application linked to that family across every term, not just the one that got them approved.