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School-level feature — managed within your school portal at yourschool.deandesk.com.
A roster is a named group of students that you can use across DeanDesk — for sending targeted emails, organizing camp groups, building activity squads, tracking small groups, or any other use case where you need to refer to “this specific set of students” repeatedly. A roster can also carry a list of courses and a list of tuition products so that adding a student to the roster automatically enrolls them in the right courses or surfaces in product reports. Open Admin Dashboard → Rosters to manage your school’s rosters.

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Creating a roster

1

Open Rosters

Go to Admin Dashboard → Rosters and click New Roster.
2

Name and describe

Give the roster a name (e.g. “5th Grade Camp Group A”, “Drama Club”, “Bus Route 4”) and an optional description.
3

Fill in custom metadata

If your school has configured custom roster metadata fields, fill them in. See Roster metadata below.
4

Add students

Add students manually or use the Roster Distribution canvas for bulk assignment.
5

Save

Save the roster. It’s now available across DeanDesk wherever you can target a roster (email composer, announcements, reports).

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Roster metadata

Custom metadata fields let you attach school-specific information to each roster — things like meeting time, instructor, room number, or season.

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Configuring the schema

1

Open the metadata schema

Go to Admin Dashboard → Rosters → Metadata Schema.
2

Add a field

For each field, set:
3

Save

Save. The fields appear on the roster create/edit form immediately.

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Person and people fields

The person and people field types let you reference specific users (e.g. an instructor or co-leaders) directly on the roster, with a search picker that pulls from your school’s users.

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Roster Distribution canvas

For bulk assignment of students into multiple rosters at once, use the Roster Distribution canvas — a drag-and-drop workspace.
1

Open Roster Distribution

Go to Admin Dashboard → Rosters → Distribute.
2

Step 1 — Pick rosters

Select the rosters you want to distribute students into. Each becomes a “bucket” on the canvas.
3

Step 2 — Pick students

Select the pool of students to distribute. Students appear as draggable tiles.
4

Step 3 — Open the canvas

The canvas opens with rosters as buckets and students as tiles. Drag tiles into buckets to add, drag them out to remove. Use search, zoom, and fullscreen to navigate large distributions.
5

Save

Apply changes. DeanDesk processes all the additions and removals in bulk.
Roster Distribution is paired with Course Distribution, which uses the same drag-and-drop pattern for course enrollments. Both are big time-savers at the start of a term or season.

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Spreadsheet view

For roster-by-roster bulk edits (e.g. fixing typos or updating metadata across many rosters), open the Roster Spreadsheet view. It loads all rosters into a grid editor where you can edit cells inline and submit only changed rows.

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Linking rosters to courses

Each roster can have one or more linked courses. When you add a student to a roster that has linked courses, DeanDesk automatically creates an active enrollment for that student in every linked course. Likewise, adding a new course to a roster enrolls every current member of the roster in that course.
1

Open the roster

From Admin Dashboard → Rosters, open the roster you want to link courses to.
2

Add courses

In the Courses multi-select, pick the courses you want to link.
3

Save

Save. Enrollments are created in bulk. DeanDesk shows a summary with counts of enrollments created, reactivated (re-enabled archived ones), unchanged, and failed.
Course enrollment sync only fires when you add students or courses to a roster. Removing a student from a roster does not automatically unenroll them from the linked courses — you’ll need to manage that separately if you want them removed.

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Linking rosters to tuition products

Tuition products in Finance → Products can be associated with rosters from the product detail page. This lets the Roster Distribution canvas highlight which students in your pool are already enrolled in a specific tuition product — useful for distributing only newly-paid students into camp groups or class sections. When you open the distribution canvas with a tuition product filter, each student card shows a Tuition label of Enrolled or Not enrolled, and you can sort by tuition enrollment to surface the relevant students at the top. See Products → Associated rosters for how to set up the link on the product side.

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Where rosters appear

Once a roster exists, you can target it from: