School

School contacts

The class teacher, a few classmates for carpooling, their parents for the birthday invitation, the maths teacher: contacts pile up around school that usually have nothing to do with the rest of your family. So they don't clutter your directory, while staying within reach, every child has their own class list in the School module – separate from your family's contacts.

Where to find them

In the School module, in the child's profile, under “Contacts”. Each child has their own list – one child's class list doesn't show up under a sibling's, even if they go to the same school.

Adding one – two ways

Add new – name, role, and whatever details you have (phone, email, birthday, note).
Link an existing contact – if you already have the person somewhere in patchio, you select them and just assign a role for this child. The picker shows you two groups: From your family directory (the contact stays in the directory as normal alongside this) and From other class lists – that is, your other children's school contacts. That's exactly the everyday case with siblings at the same school: the same teacher, the same school office, the same after-school care (Hort), but entered once and maintained once.

Role – who this is for this child

Every entry gets a role: classmate, teacher, parent (of a classmate) or other. For a teacher, you can also enter the subject (“Maths”, “English”) – handy when the same person teaches a different subject for a sibling.

Contact-person lines

Some contacts aren't a single person, but an office with several people behind it – the school office, the after-school care (Hort). Instead of creating a separate contact for each person, you enter them as contact-person lines within a single contact: name, relationship/role, phone, email and a note per line. “Primary school office” then holds the secretary (mornings) and the caretaker, without you having to create two cards and maintain both addresses.

These contact-person lines are now also available for contacts in your family directory – the idea originally came from the School module, but it's just as useful for a landlord with two property managers, or a nursery with several carers.

Birthday – no calendar entry by default

If you enter a birthday for a newly added school contact, it does not automatically go into the calendar – unlike contacts from your family directory. The reason: a class list quickly fills up with twenty or thirty names, and nobody wants twenty new birthdays unexpectedly showing up in the family calendar just because they entered the whole class. Only once you turn on the “Birthday in calendar” switch for an individual contact does patchio create a reminder for it – deliberately, just for that one.

Important: the switch only controls the calendar entry. School contacts never appear on the birthday list (Occasions → Birthdays), even with the switch on – that list is fed exclusively from your family directory.

Moving into the family directory

If a school contact turns out to be worth keeping long-term – the best friend from class is also at the sports club, the school office also gets in touch about holiday childcare – you bring them into your normal directory with “Add to the family directory”. The entry in the class list stays as it is – the contact then exists in both places. In the directory, they're a completely ordinary family contact from that point on: they show up there, can be tagged, pinned and, if you share contacts with other households, shared too.

A stored birthday moves into the calendar along with it, just like any other family contact. That's deliberate: the “Birthday in calendar” switch is a class-list special case; the directory doesn't have it at all. Without carrying it over, a moved contact would have a birthday on the birthday list but nowhere in the calendar – and no way left to fix that. If you don't want the calendar entry, remove the birthday from the contact in the directory again – the event disappears with it.

School contacts stay to themselves

As long as a contact exists only in the class list (i.e. hasn't been moved over):

It does not appear in the family directory.
It does not appear on the birthday list, even with the calendar switch on (see above).
It can't be shared with other households via a code – unlike contacts from your family directory, it stays exclusively within your own household.

Who can do this?

The same rule as the rest of the School module: adding, changing and deleting is for admins, members with the “Manage school” permission – and the child themselves, if they have their own profile.