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Transgender and Non-binary students

Jeffrey Harrison

Please help push Blackbaud towards making their systems inclusive for transgender and non-binary students. There are a number of ideas in the idea portal that need to get up-voted so that Blackbaud will take this topic seriously. Below are some of the idea sugestions you can support.

K12CO-I-3427
K12CO-I-3223
K12OR-I-2470
K12OR-I-2538
K12OC-I-2865
K12CO-I-3267
K12OC-I-2881
K12CO-I-2843

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Comments

Dave Levin

@Jeffrey Harrison
Thanks for compiling all of these IdeaBank ideas. Thought I had already voted for all of them! Truly troubling that Blackbaud is not taking these needs seriously or giving them priority. It may very well force Schools to choose other platforms due to legal requirements to protect students, and the active harm that their product empowers.

Jessi Walters

@Jeffrey Harrison I'm Jessi, the Product Manager for Core. Adding pronoun customization and de-coupling them from gender is on our roadmap for work this summer along with several other changes for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Seeing that you're passionate about this topic, would you be open to a conversation about how we can better support your community?

To any who see this reply: if you are interested in sharing your feedback regarding DE&I with me directly, please email me directly at jessica dot walters at blackbaud dot com. You can also trigger an email in my inbox by commenting on any of the Ideas Jeffrey pasted above.

Thanks, all!

Jeffrey Harrison

@Dave Levin
When we switched to Blackbaud the head of school said we were not allowed to switch LMS and SIS system again. Because of this, he nolonger stands by those words.

Jeffrey Harrison

@Jessi Walters
I'm glad to hear that you are adding pronoun customization and de-coupling them from gender, but it doesn't address the issue of preferred names vs first names in the LMS and SIS side of things.

As you probably know, Core already has a partial fix with "User profile settings">"User name formats." Despite the warning right on the page, “Warning, changing this pattern will change the way names are displayed throughout your system.” not every part of Blackbaud uses the User Name Format you set. Even more baffling, in Athletics, rather than using the User Name Format, a system was created where you could go into each individual student and check two check boxes so that it will display preferred name over first name?

The most frustrating part is that 3 years ago when someone made a change to User Name Format the warning was actually correct! It did change the way names were displayed throughout the system.

I will reach out to you directly via email with my contact information, but I really think the discussion board is the proper for this as it allows more people to see the thoughts and ideas and weight in on them.

Thanks, Jeff

Brian Gray

@Jessi Walters -

Our attorney tells us that we must maintain the student’s legal first name and legal last name in Core. The only place that we have to use the legal first name is on a transcript. Everywhere else, we could use just the preferred name (if we had control over what parts of the name are displayed in various contexts).

?There should be an option at the user level to not display the first name when viewed by various roles (User > Settings > Privacy).

There should probably be an additional entry on the list of roles in the user-level privacy settings for API access. This would allow us to control (per user) what name information is seen by 3rd-party services.

?The available pronoun choices on the user record (Contact Card > General info) should be fed from a table (Core > Settings > General Settings > Table values).

?We should be able to prevent the display of the first name in Manage Published Fields (Core > Security > Profile access > Profile publish access) for Student to Student, Student to Teacher, etc.

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And as long as we’re talking about names...

We are a boarding school with students from around the world - including many Spanish-speaking countries. In some of those countries, it is common for the legal last name to be hyphenated, but for the person to use only one part of the hyphenated name in daily use. However, which part of the last name is used varies by country and culture. For example, in some countries a person named John Smith-Jones would use John Smith casually, and in other countries he would use John Jones.

?I would like to see a Preferred Last Name field in addition to the Preferred (first) name field. This would allow us to maintain the legal first and last name, but also honor the person’s preference for how they wish to be known on campus.

---

?Another approach to thinking about the problems surrounding both the first and last names is to add a couple of fields to the user record (Legal First Name and Legal Last Name) in addition to the existing first name, preferred name and last name. For most people, the Legal First Name would be the same as the First Name, and the Legal Last Name would be the same as the Last Name. But for some people, one or the other (or both) pairs of fields would be different.

A modification to the list of available name formats on Transcripts and Report cards would allow us to choose to use the Legal FN and LN or the casual FN and LN. Additional fields in Advanced Lists and SKY Lists would allow us to extract what we want, based on the list’s purpose.

Everywhere else (rosters, directories, etc), we would use the (casual) name as we do now.

Everything on my wish-list applies to employees and parents as well as students, although employees and parents are much lower priorities for us because we can use whatever names they request on their records.

Can you have this all done for next Tuesday's release?

Susan Hemingway

@Jeffrey Harrison
Thank you for listing these. I've voted for them all. We are also struggling with the inconsistent name usage in Blackbaud.

Lauren Henderson

@Jeffrey Harrison Thank you for compiling these! There were several I hadn't voted for yet.

Jessi Walters

Hello all! I'm here to first say, “Thank you!” to all who sent me an email. I'm embarrassingly behind in replying, but I've saved those emails for this summer when the team will begin making changes.

I also have a couple important follow-up questions:
1) Is it better in your community to always default to Preferred-else-first name, or do you need the option in a lot of places (besides the transcript and exports) to make a decision about how the name will display?
2) Is it harder to preserve the identity of transgender students, or is it more challenging to support a student who is not yet out to their parents?
3) Would you always prefer the same name format for consistency and ease of reporting, or is it very much dependent on where a user is looking at the student's information? (think: directory, academic profile, Core profile, class roster, gradebook, etc.)

We're trying to determine whether Preferred name is always appropriate or if we need to take User name format far more broadly than it was ever used before.

Thanks for your contributions!

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

@Jeffrey Harrison Thanks for this list! I've added my votes!

Jeffrey Harrison

@Jessi Walters
1. In core, the ability to pick the name format is very nice. I would keep this ability in the system as not every school will want the same thing here. My school prefers to use Preferred-else-first-name so that is how we have it set. Sometimes times we need this different in certain cases. More on this in the other answers.

2. Most of our non-binary or transgender students are out to their parents. To preserve their identity, we currently must train and then send out reminders to teachers to not use their first name and instead use their preferred name. Inevitably we have one or two teachers who mess up at the start of every term. This could be easily fixed in Blackbaud by making "User Name Format" actually do what it says it should do.

We rarely have a student who isn't out to their parents and is openly using their preferred name and pronouns at school. More often, we have parents that don't support the student's choice or divorced parents where one parent supports their student's choice, and one parent doesn't support the student's choice. Handling this situation goes beyond just the Blackbaud database.

3. Preferred name username format definitely needs to be for more broadly looked at. When we get a parent that isn’t supportive of a student’s choice our current policy is that in the dorm and classrooms, we will support student's choice to go by their preferred name, but all communications to the parents will use the first name. This means that in Blackbaud we cannot have that student's preferred name as the parent would then see the preferred name over the first name. At the minimum it would be nice to have something like the "User Name Format" for each of the main constituent views.

Anita Pinkerton

@Jeffrey Harrison
These are not universally needed by all schools. I would hate to see other feature requests that have been in the ideas portal for YEARS continue to languish because of these items.

Jeffrey Harrison

@Anita Pinkerton
There are many ideas, including these ones that have been posted on the ideas board for a while. Many of these ideas are not needed by all schools. It doesn't make them any less important to the people requesting them. I frequently support other schools by up voting ideas we don't need but I see them as being good ideas. Just because my current employer doesn't need the feature doesn't mean a future school I work for won't.

Some ideas may be wanted by more schools but these schools aren't requiring them to stay with the product. Other ideas might be needed by fewer schools, but they are things the schools are willing to switch products over. If Blackbaud is willing to have customers switch companies based on what ideas they implement, that is their choice. Which LMS/SIS my school goes with is ours. This is the way capitalism works.

I started this post to let Blackbaud know the importance of an issue to my school and to find support from other schools that also find this important. It was a conversation I was having with other schools outside the Blackbaud world that was not being talked about within the Blackbaud world. In my professional opinion, sharing our needs with the companies we work with then letting them decide what is best for their company is the proper way of doing things.

Art Bryman

Very needed. We are asking for a “Legal first name” field, and the ability to choose it in report cards/transcripts/rosters/directories/etc. The default setting should be “Do Not Display".

This issue affects not just students but faculty and staff.

Veronica Zermani

@Jessi Walters In our school we have stopped using the “preferred name” field for a few reasons:

Some student's legal names are dead names. If we put their chosen name in the “preferred name" field, their "first name" (legal name) is still visible to them on their contact card (and in a few other areas of the system) and it triggers them.
Students are able to see the "first name" and “preferred name” of other students when going to their contact card. The school could face serious legal problems, as this could lead to cases of outing other students as transgender.
We learned “chosen name” is more appropriate, as “preferred” implies that there is a choice in what the person wants to be called.
There are still places in the system that default to first name (not preferred name)

To remedy #1, we did the following:

Put their chosen name in the first name field, and
Created an “admin view only” field called “legal name." This field is only available to select staff, and is only used on the transcript.
Now our transcripts print with the “First and Last name” fields and below that we added our admin view only “legal name” field.

Brian Gray

@Veronica Zermani - What you're doing with transcripts is interesting. This may be the solution we've been looking for.

Do you populate the Admin-viewable legal name field for all students, or just some?

Can you post a redacted screenshot of that section of a transcript so I can see how you have it arranged?

Veronica Zermani

@Brian Gray - Here are some screenshots:

de452bfab9e769b2fc2b491532c07a0a-huge-sc — Backend setup

fad365335a56f7a60d40adeaca932595-huge-sc — How it appears on the transcript

Most students end up having identical “first and last name” and “legal name," but this is helpful in cases where the names differ. This was the only way we could ensure students wouldn't see their own or other student's “dead names."

@Jessi Walters - What we still struggle with is having chosen names displayed for students who are not out yet at home. They want their teachers and classmates to call them by one name (and have it appear on lists, rosters, etc.), but they don't want their parents to know. Right now there is no way to ensure teachers and students can see the name WITHOUT parents seeing it. We thought profile notices could solve this, but if they happen to see that big yellow alert on their account while looking over a teachers shoulder, they get alarmed and feel it's pointing a big finger at them.

There are so many little nuances that could carry huge consequences. We're just trying to help our students feel safe and accepted while at school, and this system can make or break that.

Brian Gray

@Veronica Zermani - Thanks for posting the screenshots. One more question…do you use Core as the information source for any 3rd party services for which the legal name may matter? (I'm thinking about Magnus Health, etc.)

Veronica Zermani

@Brian Gray - We do use core as the information source. Magnus is the only system where we would want the legal name to be accessible to the managing staff, but unfortunately that information doesn't sync. I provide a spreadsheet of student chosen and legal names to our nurses and that seems to be working, but it would be nice to have it auto populate in Magnus.

Brian Gray

@Veronica Zermani - thanks for the details. I'm going to talk with our Health Center director and then others at the school to see what they think about this option.