Roles & Permissions

Swiftscore organizes access around four roles: Admin, Principal, Teacher, and Board. Every account is assigned one of these roles, and that role determines which schools, evaluations, and tools the account can see — both in the interface and on every request the platform makes behind the scenes.

This page is a reference for what each role grants. Use it alongside the workflow guides for board members and principals if you want the step-by-step view of a specific role's day-to-day experience.

The four roles at a glance

Admin

Admin accounts have district-wide access. An admin can do everything a principal can do, but at the scale of the entire district rather than a single school.

What an admin can see and do:

• View every school, every teacher, and every evaluation across the district.
• Create and manage evaluations for any teacher at any school — directly, without needing a principal to initiate it. The evaluation is recorded under the teacher's school, and the admin is recorded as the evaluator.
• Access district-wide dashboards, analytics, and reporting that summarize activity across all schools.
• Manage organization settings, including users, roles, and configuration.

If an admin's account has been set up with only board-portal access (common for districts in the early stages of rolling out school board evaluations), their experience is simplified to just that one surface — see Board Member Portal for what that looks like. Once the rest of the platform is enabled for that account, the full admin experience described above becomes available automatically.

Principal

Principal accounts are scoped to a school. A principal sees only their own school's data — never another school's teachers, evaluations, or records, even if they search or try to navigate there directly.

What a principal can see and do:

• View a dashboard scoped to their school, including a roster of their teachers and recent evaluation activity.
• Create and manage evaluations only for teachers within their own school.
• Review evidence, scoring, and coaching guidance for evaluations they've created.

Some principals are assigned to more than one school. In that case, their dashboard reflects all of the schools they've been assigned to, but the same rule applies: they can only see and act on data belonging to schools on their list.

If a principal attempts to reach a teacher or record outside their assigned school — whether by searching, filtering, or navigating to a direct link — the platform blocks the request. This scoping is enforced consistently across the product, not just on the dashboard.

See Creating an Observation as a Principal for the full walkthrough of a principal's evaluation workflow.

Teacher

Teacher accounts are scoped to the individual — a teacher sees their own portal and their own records only.

What a teacher can see and do:

• View their own teacher portal, including evaluations and feedback that have been shared with them.
• Create their own self-evaluation or reflection artifacts.

Artifacts a teacher creates are private by default. They remain visible only to the teacher until the teacher explicitly chooses to share them. Teachers cannot view or modify another teacher's evaluations or records.

Board

Board accounts are the most narrowly scoped role in Swiftscore. They exist for one purpose: school board members reviewing and responding to their superintendent's evaluation.

What a board account can see and do:

• Review the superintendent's evaluation for the current cycle, including goals, status, and timeline.
• Participate in surveys and interviews associated with the cycle.
• Upload goals.
• Add other board members to the cycle.

Board access is intentionally isolated from the rest of the platform. Board accounts cannot see district dashboards, teacher or staff lists, individual teacher evaluation records, or any tools for creating or managing evaluations. If a board account attempts to navigate to one of those areas, it is redirected back to the evaluation portal.

See Board Member Portal for the full walkthrough, including how the evaluation cycle moves through its stages.

How scoping works

Access in Swiftscore is enforced at two levels, so what you see in the interface always matches what you're allowed to do:

• Interface level — navigation, dashboards, and action buttons (like "create evaluation" or "send to teacher") only appear for roles permitted to use them.
• Request level — every request to the platform is checked against the signed-in account's role and school assignment. A request for data outside that scope is rejected, regardless of how the request was made.

This means scoping isn't just a matter of hidden navigation — it's enforced even if you know or guess a direct link to something outside your access. A teacher can't reach another teacher's records, a principal can't reach another school's roster, and a board account can't reach the rest of the platform, no matter how they try to get there.

School scope for multi-school principals

A principal can be assigned to one school or several. Either way, their dashboard and evaluation tools only ever include the schools on their assignment list — district-wide visibility is reserved for the Admin role.

Board isolation

The board role is deliberately kept separate from every other surface in the product. Board accounts are created by a district administrator and operate independently of staff, principal, and superintendent accounts. A district enables the board portal for its organization, and any account issued board-level credentials lands directly in that portal on sign-in — there is no separate setup step and no path from a board account into staff-level data.

Signing in

All roles sign in through the same login page, with support for email/password, Google, and Clever (if enabled by your district), plus two-step verification where configured. After authentication, Swiftscore reads the account's role and school assignment and routes the user to the right starting point automatically — a district dashboard for Admins, a school dashboard for Principals, a teacher portal for Teachers, or the evaluation portal for Board accounts. No manual role selection is required.