Cannot House a Student in a Dormitory If They Are Also Employees

Jamie Cross

Hey All,


So I came across an issue this week for users who are enrolled as a student but also have an employee record. I wasn't entirely pleased with my response from support and figured that I should post the situation in the community forums to get user feedback and to also hopefully get some feedback from any product managers who happen to comment on some of these posts.


When I go to "Extracurriculars - Residential Life - Dorm Management", pick my academic year, school level, go to my Dorm building, go to the Room I want to house them in and bring up the "Manage Residents" dialog, type in the first few characters of their last name to bring them up and they are not found.


I created a case and was told that, yep they will not show because they are employees and only students are allowed to be housed in a dorm. I informed my support person they are indeed enrolled as students. I have scheduled them for Academics, scheduled them for Activities, and scheduled them into Advisories without any issue. I don't have a need for my to be able to add them to an Athletic team but verified that I could indeed add them to a team if I wanted to.


To quote support:

"For dorms and dorms rooms, these are ideally meant to have students enrolled into them. The other piece here is that students are typically not given and employee or employment at the school while they are still a student at the school. This is causing a role conflict which is why [user] doesn't show up."


For whatever reason, a line in the sand has been drawn with regards to housing students with an employee record.


I have two very real use cases for needing students to have the ability to be employed and also be housed. For all programs at our school we are 100% boarding.


1. For our summer program (currently about to start), we employee interns to assist our teachers in academic work, assist house supervisors in dorm life, and actually lead afternoon activities. These interns are evaluated at the end of the program so I enrolled them as students so that faculty (Academics), the program director (Advisory) and their head of house (Dormitory) can use the system to enter comments and then we could create a report card to serve as their evaluation document. For our school year program we have a similar program for teaching fellows that we don't currently use the system for their evaluations but may like to in the future.


2. During our normal school year we may actually have real live students (juniors & seniors) who may actually be employed by the school as lifeguards, library assistants, advancement help, bookstore, work study, etc. Being 100% residential, I need to house these student employees!


So here was my "solution" from support:

"If you go to her record in core, remove/undo change for her employment, then enroll her into the dorm. You can then assign the employment role back after the user is enrolled in the dorm room. This will have to be done each time likely when you place a user that has a student/faculty role into any dorm."


So I went through my 19 intern records and "unemployed" them. For each of my dorms I currently have a room called "Pending" with a capacity of 50 and I went through each dorm and assigned my actual summer students and my now unemployed interns. After I housed everyone, I went back and re-employed my interns.

The next day, the summer program office informed me of a handful of students that needed to move dorms. So I went in to remove these students from their current dorm and and got a wonderful "An error was encountered while trying to save the resident changes". I can't make any changes now because the re-employed interns are also housed in the "Pending" room.


My response from support is basically: "It is what it is."


So if you got this far, what are your thoughts?


I feel that this is an inherent flaw in the system (especially with use case #2 above) and not even a bug really but a conscious effort to cripple the system in one area where you have not limited it anywhere else in the system. I would have liked my support rep to maybe at least try to pass it up the food chain a bit (product manager, programmer) and at least come back with a justification for the limitation but that was not the case.

Candace Chesler

Hi Jamie -

Is it business critical for you to give the students an employment record - or could you manage their employment roles in a different manner?

For example, we also employ students as interns - but I don't mark them as Employees of the school. In their role as interns they do not supervise a group of students - they are not responsible for taking attendance, communicating with parents, entering conduct or doing grading. I create an Activity Group for Interns - I enroll them in that group - which allows the intern supervisor to communicate with them if needed - but keeps their role in K-12 as Student.

Jamie Cross

For my use cases it would be critical to have them as employees because through SKY API I've created a scheduled console app that pulls certain data from Blackbaud K12 hourly which in turn feeds 5+ other systems on campus (Library, ID Maker, REACH, Maxient, Medicat, etc.) Some of those systems specifically need to know that a user is an employee.


In the case of our interns and more specifically our school year teaching fellows, they would also need to have the faculty role because they will actually teach or co-teach academic classes and need to be able to post grades & comments. They may also be athletic coaches and\\or activity leaders. In all three of those roles they would also be required to take attendance.

John Burns

@Jamie Cross We are a new BBEM School and are searching to a solution to this issue as well. I'll add another use case to those you have already specified. We have Faculty who live in apartments in the dorms. We would like to assign those Faculty to specific apartments (not just as dorm leaders) as part of the complete dorm resident picture.

Art Bryman

@Candace Chesler:
Hi Jamie -
Is it business critical for you to give the students an employment record - or could you manage their employment roles in a different manner?

Sadly, this is Blackbaud's response, too. We are unable to add student employees to athletics teams (EMS forces them in as coaches), and they can't see their class schedule. Ending their employment (making them past …) doesn't fix the issues. We have to wipe their whole employment history.

We want student employees to show up in staff directories, to receive employee communications, and track their employment history, without creating a separate record. We also just want to use existing processes and workflows, instead of upending our own. This is not possible, thanks to a coder who many years ago chose to ignore our needs, and management that chose not to fix the issue.