homeroom.vision · The direction page
What Homeroom is for, and what it intends next — labeled.
Most roadmap pages are a sales document with dates on it. This one is a ledger. Every line below says which of four states it is in, who owns it, and how you could check. Nothing on this page is for sale and nothing on it asks you for anything.
What this page is, and the three things it deliberately is not
Homeroom is the record a school actually runs its day on: the students, the staff, the rosters, the office work that has to be right on a Tuesday morning. This page exists to say where that is going, in public, in a form you can hold us to.
It is not a family portal. If you are a parent looking for your child's school, that is homeroom.family, and it is written for you rather than for a board.
It is not a second pitch for the flagship. Every capability named below points at the host that owns it instead of being re-sold here. If this page starts reading like a product tour, it has drifted off its own brief.
It is not a deck. There is nothing to download, no form, no checkout, and no gated content behind an address field. A direction page that harvests contact details is an ad wearing a roadmap's clothes.
The reason to be this strict is narrow and practical: this is the one page in the estate whose subject matter is what we have not built. That makes it the easiest place in the whole system to smuggle in a promise, so it carries the tightest rules.
How we label a claim, and why there are four states rather than two
A two-state roadmap — done or not done — forces every honest uncertainty into one of two lies. The measurement feed behind this estate uses four values for exactly that reason, and its own notes say plainly that counting an unknown as a no is the specific defect it exists to prevent. This page uses the same four words so that a reader of both is not reading two vocabularies.
Running today. A school can use it now, on the host named beside it. Not written, not merged, not deployed — reachable and doing the thing.
Built, switched off. The code exists and is not switched on for anyone. This is a real and common state and it is the one most often reported as shipped. It is not shipped. It is built.
Intended, not built. We mean to build it and have not. Saying so here confers nothing on the host it names.
Off on purpose. A decision, not a gap. Something we could build and are choosing not to run, for a reason stated on the line.
The distinction that does the most work is between the second and the fourth. “Built” and “running” are different rungs, and a system that reports them as one word is how a school ends up depending on something that was never switched on.
What is true today
These run now. Each is described where it lives rather than re-pitched here, which is the point of a direction page as opposed to a sales page — go and read what each host says about itself, including the parts where it bounds its own claim.
The school record: students, staff, rosters, the office day
This is the flagship and it is the thing schools actually log into. It is described where it lives, not re-pitched here.
Running today
Owned by homeroom.software
Scheduling, from picture day to facilities to field dispatch
Sold as its own product on its own engine, not as a Homeroom module. Its no-double-book and per-slot-capacity invariants are enforced at the database, not in the form.
Running today
Owned by schedule.software
The photo library and the collections that hang off it
The library and its per-collection doors are built. Editing surfaces are bounded OUT of that claim, and this page does not widen it.
Running today
Owned by homeroom.gallery
The family-facing side of the record
The one address in the fleet written for a parent rather than a board. This page is not that page and does not duplicate it.
Running today
Owned by homeroom.family
Notice what is not in that list: no payment, no machine-written text, no mail. Those are the next section, and they are decisions rather than omissions.
What is off, and why it is off
Three whole categories are switched off across this estate. Each is stated in the present tense, because the honest form of a switch is what it is doing right now, not what it might do later.
Taking money: fees, orders, checkout
No checkout runs anywhere in this estate today, including on this page. It stays off until it is turned on deliberately, and a page that offered you a cart before then would be lying about a payment it cannot take.
Off on purpose
Owned by the platform
Machine-generated writing, tagging or recommendations
Off across the estate. On a system holding minors' records the failure mode of a confident wrong answer is a child mislabeled, so this is a decision rather than a gap.
Off on purpose
Owned by the platform
Sending and receiving mail from a school address
No mailbox is provisioned and no mail is sent from these products today. Where a surface names a mail feature, that sentence is a branch of the function that refuses the act -- or it is deleted.
Off on purpose
Owned by the platform
The objection to this section is fair and worth answering: is “off on purpose” just a nicer name for “we could not build it”? The test is whether the reason survives contact with a specific case. Payment is off because a page that shows you a cart it cannot charge has already lied to you. Machine-written text is off because the failure mode on a minors' record is a child mislabeled by a confident wrong answer. Mail is off because no mailbox is provisioned, and a send button over an unprovisioned mailbox loses the message silently.
Each of those is a sentence you can check against the product. If any of them stops being true, the line changes here first.
What we intend next, and what that word buys you
An intent is the weakest thing on this page. It is worth stating because a direction page with no direction is just an inventory, but it must be read for exactly what it is.
An international-schools edition
Named here as an intent so the direction is legible. Saying so on this page does not move that host's status by one inch; go and read what it says about itself.
Intended, not built
Owned by homeroom.international
Naming an intent here does not upgrade the host it names. If a host says of itself that it does not do something, this page saying we intend it does not change that by one word. The host is authoritative about the host. This page is authoritative only about the ordering.
There are no dates. A date on a roadmap is a commitment made by the person with the least information at the moment they have the least of it, and the honest thing to do with one is not print it.
What we will not build
A direction is defined as much by its exclusions, and these are the ones we get asked about most.
Anything that makes a minor's record public by default. Consent gates are not a setting we would ever ship open and quietly hope nobody notices. This constrains real features, and we would rather lose those features.
Behavioural advertising, data resale, or a free tier paid for with student data. There is no version of this where the families are the product. That closes off the cheapest possible business model, deliberately.
A scoring or ranking layer over children. The system holds records; it does not rate the people in them. This is the one on the list we are least likely to revisit.
Lock-in by export hostility. A school that wants its data out should get it out. Retention through friction is a confession that the product cannot hold anyone on merit.
Who this page is for — and who it is not for
An administrator deciding whether to depend on us. The useful question is not what a vendor promises but what it will admit. This page is written so that the admissions are the easy part to find, because those are what actually predict how a system behaves in year three.
A district technology lead doing diligence. The four-state vocabulary above is the same one our internal measurement uses. You are reading the labels we use on ourselves, not a version prepared for you.
Someone already running Homeroom who wants to know what is next. The ordering here is real; the absence of dates is also real.
It is not for a parent. That is homeroom.family, and sending a parent here would be answering a question they did not ask with a document about our engineering priorities.
It is not for someone who wants to be sold to. The flagship does that job and does it in its own voice. This page will keep pointing you there instead of doing it badly in duplicate.
Fair objections
“A page that brags about honesty is doing marketing about honesty.” True, and it is the sharpest objection on the list. The only defence that means anything is the cost: this page names three whole revenue categories as off, prints no dates, offers no download, and tells one class of reader to go somewhere else entirely. A page performing honesty would not pay that.
“Off on purpose is unfalsifiable.” It would be, stated bare. Each one above carries a specific failure it is avoiding, and a specific failure is checkable: if we ship a cart, or machine-written text on a student record, the line was false and you can see it.
“No dates makes this useless for planning.” Partly fair. What replaces a date is the state label and the owning host: you can check the state of the thing you care about directly, whenever you want, rather than waiting for a quarter we named once.
“You are describing process, not product.” For this host, that is the product. The thing being offered here is a legible account of what is real, and every capability lives on the host that owns it.
“What does it cost me to not have this?” Nothing directly — this page is not a purchase. What it costs to not have a page like this from a vendor is the ordinary thing: you find out in year two which of the features in the sales deck were built, which were switched on, and which were a slide.
How we decide, including when we disagree with ourselves
This page exists because of a documented internal disagreement about what this address was even for, and it is more useful to show that than to hide it.
Two parts of the system held different answers: one described this host as the direction page, with its exclusions spelled out; another had it filed as a family-delivery door. The tie was not broken by whoever wrote last. It was broken on the fact that the second reading collided with a host that already owns family delivery, and the first did not collide with anything.
The general rule that came out of it: when two parts of a system disagree, the reading that duplicates an existing owner loses to the reading that does not, and the disagreement gets written down where a later reader can check the reasoning rather than inherit the conclusion.
The same discipline applies to every line on this page. A claim carries its state, its owner and its reason, so that disagreeing with us requires only reading, not access.
The next step
There is no form on this page and nothing to sign up for. The concrete next step depends on which reader you are, and all three are somewhere else on purpose.
Evaluating Homeroom for a school: go to homeroom.software, which is the flagship and the thing you would actually be adopting. It states its own capabilities and its own bounds.
A parent or guardian: homeroom.family is written for you.
Checking a specific capability named above: go to the host in the “owned by” column and read what it says about itself. That host is authoritative and this page is not.