How to sync Synergy SIS (Edupoint) with Kastr
Synergy districts tend to be large and frequently sit under a county office, which makes two questions unusually important: how contact rights translate into who may be messaged, and who can see whose data when several districts share a tenancy. This page answers both, and draws the line between ParentVUE and a communications platform so you do not pay twice for the same job.
| Synergy indicator | Legal meaning | Export as a guardian? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Educational rights | May receive student records and act for the student | Yes | Linked to the student in the entry |
| Guardianship / custody | Legal custody of the student | Yes | Linked to the student in the entry |
| Release-to, no educational rights | May collect the child, no records access | No, by default | A roster entry has no urgent-only setting, so an adult in the export receives every send that includes them |
| Emergency contact, sequence 2+ | Call if primaries do not answer | No | Kastr is not an emergency notification system; keep these in the one you use |
| Lives with, no rights | Household member | District choice | Decide once and apply it to everyone |
| Restricted contact | Court order or district restriction | Never | Kastr cannot see the flag, so the export is where it is enforced |
| Correspondence opt-out | Declined routine mail | District choice | A roster entry has no routine-only setting; SMS consent and opt-outs still apply to every text |
The release-to row is the one that catches people. An adult authorised to collect a child from the office is not automatically an adult who should receive a message about that child's attendance record. Synergy distinguishes the two; a lot of communication tools do not, and the result is a records-access problem rather than a nuisance. Kastr only knows who is in the export, so the distinction has to be made there.
Getting the data out of Synergy
Two practical routes, and the choice is mostly about which team does the work.
Query and Report Designer. Synergy's reporting layer can produce a scheduled extract of students, enrolments, contacts and contact indicators, delivered to a district-controlled location. This is the route that requires no new licensing and no vendor conversation, which for many districts settles it.
Broker or SIS output. Check whether your authorised provider supplies a supported OneRoster REST endpoint or CSV ZIP. Inspect guardian users, agent links and contacts before applying. Kastr does not automatically enrich a OneRoster feed from a second contacts file.
OneRoster is one input route, not a prerequisite. A proprietary Synergy extract can still be mapped by a district-owned job to the separate JSON roster API, or to the typed Kastr CSV template.
The custom JSON roster API has no dry-run mode, so reconcile the counts in the batch against Synergy before the first send. Each record's payload is SHA-256 hashed and compared with the stored hash, so a run where nothing changed writes nothing, which is a useful signal in itself when you are debugging a schedule.
Where ParentVUE ends and Kastr begins
The question a Synergy district always asks, usually in the third meeting: we already have ParentVUE, what is this for?
They do different jobs and the boundary is clean once stated. ParentVUE is a portal: it is where a parent goes to look at grades, attendance detail, assignments and records that should sit behind an authenticated session. It is pull. It is authoritative. It is gated for good reason.
A communications platform is push. It reaches a family that has not logged into anything, on a channel they already read, in a language they read it in, on a Tuesday when the boiler failed and school starts two hours late. Those are not the same product and neither substitutes for the other.
The practical test: if the message is about one student's record, it belongs in ParentVUE. If the message is time-critical and needs to arrive whether or not anyone opens an app, it belongs in a messaging system. Attendance is the interesting middle, the detail belongs in ParentVUE, the "your child was marked absent from period 3" nudge belongs in messaging. Being straight about our side of that: Kastr's auto-notice rules configure but no engine fires them yet, so today an attendance nudge is a message somebody composes.
County offices, multi-district tenancy and who sees what
Synergy's install base skews toward county offices of education and multi-district deployments, which makes tenancy a procurement question rather than an implementation detail.
Kastr's isolation is enforced in Postgres rather than in application code. Every transaction runs under a non-owner, DML-only database role with row-level security policies attached, so a query that forgets a filter returns nothing rather than everything. The policies are hierarchy-aware: a district sees its own rows and its child schools' rows, never a sibling district's. With no organisation context set, policies evaluate against NULL and return zero rows, it fails closed rather than open.
What a county office can and cannot see. A county office configured as the parent organisation sees its member districts' rows. A member district sees its own and its schools', and cannot see a sibling district's at any level, including through the API and the CLI. The cross-tenant leakage test suite runs in continuous integration against a real Postgres 16 instance, and includes a regression check specifically for the owner-role bypass, which is the way this control usually fails quietly elsewhere.
If your county structure is more complicated than parent-and-children, shared programmes, students enrolled across two member districts, a JPA arrangement, raise it early. The model handles hierarchies; it does not handle every governance arrangement automatically.
Delivery behaviour worth knowing before you sign
Once the roster is in, three behaviours shape what families actually experience:
- Quiet hours, default 21:00 to 07:00. Ordinary messages queue until morning. Urgent-flagged messages ignore quiet hours (SMS consent and opt-outs still apply), and the ability to flag a message as urgent is a capability granted to specific people rather than a checkbox everyone has.
- Retries and delivery receipts. A failed SMS or email delivery is retried, and delivery receipts record what actually arrived. There is no voice channel, so a failed text is not followed by a phone call.
- Channel and reach preview. The composer shows the recipient count and the channels you have chosen, with a translation preview, before you send.
What we do not have and Synergy districts sometimes assume: attachments, photo and video sharing, voice calls, mobile push notifications, and single sign-on of any kind. Staff and families authenticate with a magic link or not at all.
Questions people actually ask
Does Kastr replace ParentVUE?
No, and it should not. ParentVUE is an authenticated portal for records, grades, attendance detail, student-specific documents. Kastr is push messaging for announcements, closures and urgent notices over SMS and email. The test is whether the message needs to arrive whether or not anyone logs in. If it does, it is not a portal job.
What should our export do with a Synergy contact who has release-to rights but no educational rights?
Leave them out by default. A roster entry has no urgent-only setting, so an adult in the export receives every send whose audience includes them. The distinction matters because an adult authorised to collect a child is not automatically an adult authorised to receive information about that child's record.
Can a county office of education see member-district data in Kastr?
Yes, if it is configured as the parent organisation, and only downward. Isolation is enforced by Postgres row-level security under a non-owner role, hierarchy-aware, and it fails closed when no organisation context is set. A member district cannot see a sibling district's data through the interface, the API or the CLI, and the cross-tenant test suite runs against real Postgres in CI.
Which Synergy export gives me guardian mobile numbers?
A Query or Report Designer extract built against the contact records, including phone type and the contact indicators. If you take the broker OneRoster route instead, expect guardian contact coverage to be thin, that is a weakness of the standard rather than of Synergy, and plan on a supplementary contacts file.
Does Kastr require Synergy's OneRoster module?
No. Use a compatible OneRoster REST or CSV feed if available, or map your district export to the typed Kastr CSV template or custom JSON API. Verify the source fields and guardian eligibility for the chosen route.
One price. Every feature. Locked for three years.
$3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students. No tiers or add-on modules. Normal messaging is included under a published fair-use allowance, with transparent cost recovery only above it.