Everyone in a Flint school is an admin, a teacher, or a student. School admins set those roles; a teacher-labelled school or term creator with ownership can also manage people. Being an ordinary teacher does not grant that access. Roles matter: Sparky gives teachers and admins full assistance, and avoids completing work for students. Anyone with no role at all is treated as a student until you assign one.
If your own role is wrong, send this page to your school's admin — they can fix it in a few clicks.
Where roles are set
Go to Admin → Settings → People. Roles belong to a term, so check the term name shown above People in the sidebar first.
The tabs across the top — All, Admins, Teachers, Students, Unassigned — count and filter the list, and you can narrow it further by status or grade level, or search by name or email.
Set a role while adding people
When you add people, the Review people step lets you set each person's Role before they are added, or give everyone still unassigned the same role with Add (N unassigned) as.
A CSV can carry a role column so the roles arrive with the file, alongside the required email column and an optional grade level one.
Email domains work differently: everyone who joins through a domain gets the one role you picked when you added it, so choose Unassigned if those people will need a mix of roles and set them afterwards. Domain admission rules apply to the whole school; individual roles in the People table belong to the selected term.
Change one person's role
- Go to Admin → Settings → People.
- Find the person using the search box, the role tabs, or the filters.
- Open the dropdown in their Role column and choose the new role.
- Click Save in the top right, then confirm.
Change several people's roles at once
- Go to Admin → Settings → People.
- Narrow the list first if it helps — for example, open the Unassigned tab to work through everyone who has no role yet.
- Tick the people you want, or use the checkbox in the header row to select everyone currently listed.
- Click Change role in the bar that appears.
- Pick the role, click Next, check the names on Review role change, and click Apply to N people.
- Click Save in the top right, then confirm.
These recordings show an earlier settings design. Follow the current labels and review steps above.
The same bar also has Set grade levels, Resend invitations, and Remove.
Before saving role changes
- On a paid or trial school, the term's creator must remain a Teacher or Admin. Before changing the creator to Student or Unassigned, use the star icon to designate another teacher or admin as creator.
- Changing your own role from Admin opens an extra confirmation.
- Changing a moderator from Teacher or Admin to Student or Unassigned removes their moderator assignment when saved. If that would leave a grade without coverage, Flint blocks the change. Assign replacement moderation coverage first.
Catch anyone without a role
While anyone in the term has no role, a People with unassigned roles panel appears at the top of the page. The Unassigned tab shows the same people, which makes it easy to work down the list and assign each one. Once someone has a role, they move out of that tab.
Roles and SIS/LMS imports
If your school imports from an SIS or LMS, roles come in with the import — usually the fastest way to get a whole school set up correctly.
Ordinary roster imports fill in missing roles without replacing existing ones. Explicit role and grade-level corrections saved in the SIS/LMS import review are different: those corrections are applied during later manual and automatic imports and can replace values you set on the People page. If a corrected role keeps reverting, check the saved import-review correction as well as the source roster.