OneRoster: When your board shares contact data with connected learning platforms, three conditions have always decided whether a contact is published as an active record. Two of them are unchanged.
| Condition | Changed? | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contact relationship type. Only parent, mother, father, guardian, custodian and their step/foster variants are ever candidates for this feed. Emergency contacts, doctors, neighbours and other non-parental contact types are not in this population at all. | No — unchanged |
| 2 | A currently-enrolled child. The contact must have at least one child enrolled in the board this school year. | No — unchanged |
| 3 | The Legal Guardian box. Previously also required to be ticked. | Yes — removed |
How it used to work
Two separate problems affected how parents appeared to connected platforms.
Problem 1 — parents were being advertised for deletion because a box was blank.
A contact of an eligible parental relationship type, with a child currently enrolled, was still only treated as active if the Legal Guardian box was also ticked on their custody record. If that box was blank, the contact was sent to connected platforms flagged for deletion — even though that person had a child sitting in a classroom that same day.
The Legal Guardian box records a legal custody fact. It is not a statement about whether someone is a real, active parent, and it is not consistently filled in. A blank box almost always means "nobody entered this," not "this person is not a parent."
Problem 2 — one parent appeared as several unconnected people.
Contacts are stored as a separate record per school. A parent with children at two schools held two records, and each child pointed at its own school's record. To a connected platform that parent was two different users, each holding one child, and neither showing the whole family. The same thing happened within a single school when a parent held more than one record for other reasons.
On top of both: any contact marked inactive was automatically flagged for deletion, because the "is this person active" setting and the "should this record be removed" instruction were the same thing. There was no way to say "this record isn't the live one, but the person is still here."
How it works today
The Legal Guardian box no longer affects anything here. A contact of an eligible parental relationship type with at least one currently-enrolled child is published as active, whether or not the box is ticked.
Each parent now has one identity across the board. For each parent — matched on email address together with name, within your board only — one of their existing records is chosen as the primary record. Every one of that parent's children now points at that single record, and the primary record lists all the schools their children attend. A connected platform sees one parent with the whole family under them.
Nothing is deleted. The parent's other records stay published exactly as they are, on the identifiers they already had. They are simply marked as not the live identity and hold no children. Connected platforms can tidy them up at their own pace, and nothing breaks if they never do.
No contact is ever flagged for deletion by this change. Being inactive and being marked for removal are now separate. A parent whose children have all left the board becomes inactive but keeps publishing — they are never withdrawn.
Unchanged:
- The relationship-type gate still applies. Non-parental contact types are still excluded.
- Contacts with no currently-enrolled child are still excluded. The published population does not grow — no one new is added.
- Contacts with no email address are untouched. They are not grouped with anyone, not renumbered, not changed.
- Family Portal account eligibility is untouched. This does not give anyone a portal login.
- Matching never crosses board boundaries. A parent with the same email at another board is never read or connected.
- Your contact records in the SIS are unchanged. Each school still keeps its own contact record — only what the feed points at has changed.
- Student, teacher and staff records are completely unaffected.
What boards should expect: contacts previously flagged for deletion will start appearing as active, and children of the same parent will consolidate under one parent record, in the first share after the upgrade. No action is required from the board and no data clean-up is needed.
Generic example
A board has these contacts:
| Contact | Relationship type | Records held | Children | Legal Guardian box |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contact A | Mother | two — one at School E1, one at School E2 | Student 1 (Grade 7, School E1) and Student 2 (Grade 10, School E2), both currently enrolled | blank on the E1 record, ticked on the E2 record |
| Contact B | Father | one, School E1 | Student 1 | ticked |
| Contact C | Emergency contact | one, School E1 | Student 1 | blank |
| Contact D | Guardian | one, School E1 | Student 3 — left the board in June | blank |
Before:
| Outcome | |
|---|---|
| Contact A, E1 record | Flagged for deletion — the Legal Guardian box was blank. Student 1 pointed at this record. |
| Contact A, E2 record | Active. Student 2 pointed at this record. |
| Net effect for Contact A | Two separate users to a connected platform. Neither shows both children. One is an instruction to delete a real parent. |
| Contact B | Active. |
| Contact C | Never in the feed — not a parental relationship type. |
| Contact D | Previously published, now inactive — and therefore flagged for deletion. |
Today:
| Outcome | |
|---|---|
| Contact A, E1 record | Primary. Active. Lists both School E1 and School E2. Both Student 1 and Student 2 now point at this one record. |
| Contact A, E2 record | Still published on its own identifier, marked as not the live identity, holding no children. Never deleted. |
| Net effect for Contact A | One parent, both children, one identity — and no deletion instruction. |
| Contact B | Unchanged — single record, unique email, untouched in every respect. |
| Contact C | Unchanged — still not in the feed. Ticking anything would not change this. |
| Contact D | Inactive, but still published and never flagged for deletion. |
Contact A's E1 record was chosen as primary because, with each record holding one enrolled child, the tie was broken on the lower identifier. That choice is then stored permanently, so it does not move if a record is later edited, added or removed