Represent People and Your School

Students and Their Households

Understand how to represent students and their households in K-12 Architecture Kit.

People are at the heart of Valley Elementary—students, and the family and friends they share households with. Let's see how this school uses K-12 Architecture Kit to represent students and their household members.

In the world of Salesforce and K-12 Architecture Kit, people are modeled with Contacts. A Contact represents any individual person. Valley Elementary has created a Contact record for Elijah, as well as a Contact record for each of the important people in Elijah's life.

Valley Elementary also tracks Elijah's household so that staff can see whom he lives with and gain insight into his life beyond school. A household is represented by another type of record called an Account. Specifically, a Household Account. You can think of a Household Account as a container for one or more people (Contacts) who live together. (We'll see another type of Account in just a minute.)

Elijah's Contact record includes information like his birthdate, contact information (address, phone, etc.), his primary household, and his current grade level. Throughout the years, our picture of Elijah's educational journey becomes richer, as his Contact record grows with related information about his grades, his attendance, and any behavior events.

To sum up, Contacts represent people, Household Accounts group people in the same household together, and Contact records capture specific information about a specific person.

Your District and Your Schools

Now let's turn our attention to Valley Elementary, the K-5 school Elijah attends in the Valley School District. The school district also includes Valley Middle School and Valley High School.

To represent each school and the district itself, we again use Account records. But instead of using Household Account records like we did to represent a household of Contacts (people) in Elijah's family, we use Educational Institution Account records.

Similar to Household Accounts, Educational Institution Accounts are used to track information about schools and school districts, and to group together the people who work at the same educational institution like a school's principal, teachers, and support staff.

Unlike Household Accounts, you can also use Educational Institution Accounts to represent how Accounts are related. For example, since the elementary, middle, and high school are all part of the Valley School District, they can be grouped together under a single school district record.

In Salesforce lingo, the nested Account structure is called an Account Hierarchy.

These Accounts serve different purposes.

• The Valley School District Account is a top-level Account for all schools and a container for district staff.

• The Valley Elementary Account, Valley Middle School Account, and Valley High School Account are containers for the people and activities at each school.

Faculty and Other People

Understand how to represent teachers, staff, and other people involved with your school in K-12 Architecture Kit.

Remember how Valley Elementary uses a Contact record to hold information about Elijah? They use Contact records to store information about other people, too—people like teachers, other staff, and even the owner of the neighborhood pizzeria who holds annual fundraisers for the school.

Just like student Contacts, Contacts that represent teachers and staff are also associated with Accounts. Unlike student Contacts, which are associated with Household Accounts, faculty Contacts are connected to the Educational Institution Accounts where they work. For example, Mrs. Flores teaches at Valley Elementary, so her Contact record is under the Valley Elementary Account. Since Elijah's counselor works at various schools in the district, his Contact record is under the Valley School District Account.

Now what about Donna, a pizzeria owner and valuable fund raiser for the Valley School District? She’s a person, so she gets her own Contact record, of course. As an independent business owner, she partners with the district, but isn’t directly related to the school or the district. When it comes to associating her with an Account, she’s associated with yet another type of Account known as a Business Organization Account.

As you can see, every Contact is always associated with some kind of Account. Salesforce requires this relationship as part of its overall data model, and provides commonly used types of Accounts right out of the box (along with the flexibility to create your own custom types).

Let's Review How K-12 Architecture Kit Represents People

We've covered a lot of ground, and it can be easy to lose sight of some of the details. Let's see what you've learned so far about the way Valley Elementary organizes the data representing people in K-12 Architecture Kit.

• Students and their guardians are represented as Contacts under Household Accounts.

• Faculty and other people involved in the school are represented as Contacts under Educational Institution Accounts.

• Contact records contain valuable information about the people they represent.

• The school district and the schools in the district are represented with Educational Institution Accounts, with the schools nested under the district Account.

• Community members like local business owners can be represented as Contacts under Business Organization Accounts.