Clever has evolving support for importing Student Contact records from supported student information systems.

The reliability, formatting, and source of student contact information varies depending on the underlying SIS or approach used to communicate this data to Clever.

Accessing student contacts

Student contact data by student

Clever has offered support for retrieving student 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 /students/{id}/contacts.

This approach is not recommended for applications requiring all student contact data within a district, but works well for ad hoc access patterns.

Bulk student contact data by district

If your application makes heavy use of student contact data, you should use Clever's bulk lookup method at GET /contacts.

Unlike our by-student method, our bulk fetch approach supports the starting_after and ending_before parameters, allowing you to paginate through larger collections. As with most Clever collection methods, you may also use the limit parameter to specify up to 10,000 records per request. Standard rate limiting applies.

Student contact data by ID

In addition to accessing contact records by student and in bulk by district, you may also now look up individual student contact records with GET /contacts/{id} if you already know the corresponding Clever ID — usually to refresh data you've already obtained.

Additionally, you can use GET /contacts/{id}/student and GET /contacts/{id}/district if you've somehow lost track of the associated student or district associated with that student contact record.

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Please note: Unlike IDs for other record types, student contact IDs are not stable - if information changes on the student contact record, the record will receive a new Clever ID.
Additionally, Clever does not merge student contacts - if a contact is associated with two students, each record will have a unique Clever ID.

Consult the Clever Schema for more information on the fields returned in Clever responses.

Clever's Events API has limited support for Student Contacts. Events will be generated when a student contact record is added or removed.

While you should be prepared to handle studentcontacts.updated events, you are more likely to encounter a pair of studentcontacts.deleted and studentcontacts.created events in instances where data has changed for a contact.

Data warnings and required fields

It is now possible to mark student contact fields as required. As a result, it is also possible to generate data warnings when districts do not supply this data, or do not have important fields like "email" in their shared contact information. This will help your app identify error cases to build against before syncing a specific district's data. If you would like to set data warnings for student contact information, reach out to your account manager.

How student 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 student contact records, we recommend applications making extensive use of Student Contacts data to be aware of these particulars and to be extra tolerant of unusual formatting as Clever does not usually normalize 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:

student_contact field	SFTP spec field
`name`	`contact_name`
`type`	`contact_type`
`relationship`	`contact_relationship`
`phone`	`contact_phone`
`email`	`contact_email`

Limitations: Using SFTP limits the number of contacts a student can have 5 contacts maximum. No custom mappings are supported. phone_type is unsupported.

SIS-Managed Auto-Sync

Limitations: Student Contacts field support varies district-to-district. contact_relationship is often missing and sometimes you may find contact_type containing data you'd typically look for in contact_relationship. phone_type cannot be set.

PowerSchool

Supported fields	Imports:
`name` `type` `relationship` `email` `phone` `phone_type`	Father Mother Guardian EmergContacts

Infinite Campus

student_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

student_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

student_contact field	SIS field(s)
`name`	`GuardianFirstName` + " " + `GuardianLastName`
`type`	"`guardian`"
`phone`	`GuardianTelephoneNumber`
`email`	`GuardianEmailAddress`

Limitations: Student 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

student_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:

student_contact field	SIS Field(s)
`name`	`Em1Name`
`type`	"`emergency`"
`relationship`	`Em1Relation`
`phone`	`Em1Hphone`
`phone_type`	"`home`"

Primary contacts:

student_contact field	SIS Field(s)
`name`	`PrntPriName`
`type`	"`primary`"
`relationship`	`PrntPriRelation`
`email`	`PrntPriEmail`
`phone`	`PrntPriCell`
`phone_type`	"`cell`"

Illuminate

Guardians:

student_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:

student_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

student_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