Teacher permissions and substitutes

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.

Substitute requests are an optional setting, off until you turn them on. With them on, a teacher who can’t make a class day asks for a sub in HomeschoolGo, you pick who covers it, and the families in that class are told who will be teaching.

Asking for a sub

A teacher opens the class in Teaching and goes to the new Substitutes tab. They pick the class day (only upcoming days the class actually meets are listed, so break weeks and no-meet days are left out), add an optional note for the admins, and click Request a sub. Families never see the note. Owners and admins get a notification for each request. If a request still has nobody assigned on the evening before the class day, owners and admins get one reminder, sent between 6 and 9 p.m. in your co-op’s time zone.

Assigning someone

The Substitutes page lists upcoming requests under Needs a sub and Sub assigned. Reach it from the request notification, from the Open Substitutes link on Settings, or from the link on a teacher’s Substitutes tab. Choose a person and click Assign. You can pick any active adult member except the class’s own teachers, who are left out of the list for that class. If a teacher tells you in person, use Request a sub at the bottom of the page to add the request yourself.

Once you assign someone, the sub, the class’s teachers, and the adults in every family with a student enrolled in the class get a notification in the app and, if they use it, on their phone. No email is sent. The class page families open from My Classes shows a Substitute teacher card with the date and the sub’s name. Use Change sub to pick someone else; the person you replaced is told, and families get the new name. Cancel removes the request, and if a sub had already been announced, the sub and the families are told it no longer applies.