Student Contacts and Guardians
Clever Contacts
The user record type contacts
represents a guardian associated with one or more students. The reliability, formatting, and source of student contact information vary depending on the underlying SIS or approach used to communicate this data to Clever.
New in API v3.0!
In v3.0 of our Data API, contacts will now be returned as a user within the district. All contacts will be associated with at least one student but can be associated with multiple.
The
student_relationships
field will provide an array response for every relationship the user has within the SIS (e.g., if a user is listed as a parent to two students and an aunt to another, they will have one Clever ID but will receive 3 values in thestudent_relationship
response).The full contact name will be stored in the
last_name
field of the user object. This decision was made based on how contacts have been historically ingested in Clever and stored in SISs.
The Contact User Object
For a list of attributes and a sample response, please refer to the Contacts section of Clever's Data Model.
Student Relationships
student_relationship
will return an array of 3 fields: relationship
, student
, and type
. A contact will have a single student_relationship
for every instance they appear as a contact within the SIS.
Keeping Contacts Stable
It's important to note that the stability of a contact's Clever ID is dependent upon whether that contact has the sis_id
field populated in a district's SIS.
-
If the contact record does have an
sis_id
, the contact will retain the same Clever ID when any contact info changes (for example,phone
,email
, orname
). The only case where a contactβs Clever ID will change is if that contactβssis_id
changes (similar behavior to a student or teacher record). -
If the contact record does not have an
sis_id
, any change to contact data will delete the contact record and create a new one with a new corresponding Clever ID. -
Not all SISs have
sis_id
for contact data. In other cases, the field may exist but is not populated. If you find that districts you work with are missingsis_id
for contact data, we recommend you contact the district directly or work with our districts team to populate this field.
Accessing Contacts
Processing student_relationships
Contact information is especially sensitive for privacy and security purposes. Please ensure that the correct
relationship
is tied to the correct student when assigning privileges in your database.
Syncing Contacts First
If your application focuses on contact data, you should sync through all users within a district using GET /users or add a ?role
parameter to filter for contacts. You will then be able to retrieve associated students given a Clever ID by using GET /users/{id}/mystudents.
Contact Data by Student
Clever has offered support for retrieving contact data by student for some time. Given a Clever ID for a specific student, you can retrieve a collection of the contacts associated with that student using GET /users/{id}/mycontacts.
This approach is not recommended for applications requiring all contact data within a district, but works well for ad hoc access patterns.
Please note: If the contact does not have an
sis_id
, then the contact's Clever ID is not stable - if any information changes on the contact record, the record will receive a new Clever ID.Conversely, if the contact has an
sis_id
, the Clever ID will remain stable even if data changes on the record.
How Contact Data Varies
In most cases, Clever developers never need to worry about the underlying SIS a district uses. Due to the wide variance in SIS support for contact records, we recommend applications making extensive use of Contacts data to be aware of these particulars and to be extra tolerant of unusual formatting as Clever does not normalize all data from these fields.
SFTP
Districts using our SFTP upload feature can share student contacts as part of the students.csv
upload. The following fields are supported:
contact field | SFTP spec field |
---|---|
name | contact_name |
type | contact_type |
relationship | contact_relationship |
phone | contact_phone |
phone_type | contact_phone_type |
email | contact_email |
sis_id | contact_sis_id |
Limitations: Using SFTP limits the number of contacts a student can have to 5 contacts maximum. No custom mappings are supported.
SIS-Managed Auto-Sync
Limitations: Contacts field support varies district-to-district.
contact_relationship
is often missing and sometimes you may findcontact_type
containing data you'd typically look for incontact_relationship
phone_type
cannot be setcontact.sis_id
is supported for Infinite Campus, IC OneRoster API, Skyward, and Skyward API only
PowerSchool
Supported Fields | Imports: |
---|---|
_ name | _ Father |
_ type | _ Mother |
_ relationship | _ Guardian |
_ email | _ EmergContacts |
_ phone | |
_ phone_type |
Infinite Campus
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | contacts.firstName + " " + contacts.lastName |
type | always "other " |
relationship | contacts.relationship |
email | contacts.email |
phone | contacts.cellPhone or contacts.workPhone or contacts.homePhone or contacts.householdPhone |
Skyward
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | E1 Full Name |
type | always "other " |
relationship | E1 Relation Dsc |
phone | E1 Pri Phone or E1 Cell Phone |
iNOW
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | GuardianFirstName + " " + GuardianLastName |
type | "guardian " |
phone | GuardianTelephoneNumber |
email | GuardianEmailAddress |
Limitations: Contacts information from iNOW can sometimes cause sync issues with Clever. For districts experiencing these issues, contact information may be missing entirely. Districts can help alleviate these issues by using our SFTP upload approach instead.
Aeries
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | First Name + " " + Last Name |
email | EmailAddress |
phone | CellPhone |
relationship | RelationshipToStudent |
type | ContactOrder |
Tyler SIS
We support Emergency and Primary contacts from Tyler SIS.
Emergency Contacts:
contact field | SIS Field(s) |
---|---|
name | Em1Name |
type | "emergency " |
relationship | Em1Relation |
phone | Em1Hphone |
phone_type | "home " |
Primary Contacts:
contact field | SIS Field(s) |
---|---|
name | PrntPriName |
type | "primary " |
relationship | PrntPriRelation |
email | PrntPriEmail |
phone | PrntPriCell |
phone_type | "cell " |
Illuminate
Guardians:
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | contact_name_prefix + contact_first_name + contact_middle name + contact_name_suffix |
type | legal_guardian (default: "guardian ") |
email | contact_email_address |
phone | primary_phone or mobile_phone_1 or work_phone_1 or home_phone_1 |
phone_type | cell or work or home depending on which field is used above |
Emergency Contacts:
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | contact_name_prefix + contact_first_name + contact_middle name + contact_name_suffix |
type | emergency_contact (default "emergency ") |
email | contact_email_address |
phone | primary_phone or mobile_phone_1 or work_phone_1 or home_phone_1 |
phone_type | cell or work or home depending on which field is used above |
SchoolInsight
contact field | SIS field(s) |
---|---|
name | Contact First Name + " " + Contact Last Name |
type | Contact Custodial Status (default: guardian ) |
relationship | Contact Relationship |
email | Contact Email |
phone | Contact Cell Phone or Contact Work Phone or Contact Home Phone or Contact Other Phone |
phone_type | cell or work or home depending on which field is used above |
Updated about 1 month ago