Set up curbside check-in

Curbside check-in lets you require that a parent is physically near your school before they can check a child in from the app. It's a geofence: a center point (the school) and a radius around it. Everything is one screen of cards under your school, titled Curbside check-in. There's no Save button: each change writes the moment you make it, and a small Saving... indicator confirms it went through.

Turn on the geofence

The Geofence card has a single switch, Require location for parent check-in. When it's on, parents must be physically near the school to check a child in from the app.

Turning the switch on is not enough on its own. The geofence only works once you've set the anchor below. If the geofence is enabled but no anchor is set, Clear Day warns you right on the card ("No anchor set yet"), and the rule is not enforced. Set the school location before you rely on this.

Set the school location (anchor)

The anchor is the center of the geofence. On the School location (anchor) card you have two ways to set it:

• Use my current location reads your browser's location and drops the anchor where you're standing. Do this from somewhere on your campus. Your browser may ask for permission first.
• Type a Latitude and Longitude by hand if you already have the school's coordinates.

Once set, the card shows the saved point. Until then it reads Not set.

A note on privacy: Clear Day stores only this single anchor point: the school's location. It never keeps a record or trail of where parents are.

Radius and GPS-drift buffer

The Radius card has two numbers.

Allowed radius (meters) is how close to the anchor a parent must be. It can run from 10 up to 5000 meters. Pick something that covers your pickup area without reaching the road or neighboring buildings.

GPS drift buffer (meters) is extra slack added to the radius to absorb GPS inaccuracy near the edge. Phone GPS is rarely exact, so a small buffer keeps a parent who's genuinely at the curb from being turned away by a few meters of wobble. The buffer can run from 0 up to 2000 meters.

When location is unavailable

Sometimes a parent's app sends no location at all: they denied the permission, or GPS can't get a fix indoors. The When location is unavailable card decides what happens then:

• Allow falls back to a normal check-in. The parent isn't blocked just because location is missing.
• Block refuses the check-in when there's no location.

Choose Allow if you want the geofence to be a nudge rather than a hard gate, or Block if location is a firm requirement for your school.

What parents see

When your school requires location, a parent checking in from the app needs to share their location and be inside the radius (plus buffer).

If a parent has denied location permission or their phone can't get a GPS fix, what happens depends on your When location is unavailable setting above: with Allow, their check-in still goes through; with Block, the app refuses it.

To re-enable location, a parent opens their phone's settings, finds the Clear Day app, and turns location access back on, then reopens the app and tries the check-in again. On most phones this is under Settings, then the app's entry, then Location (or Privacy, then Location Services, then Clear Day).

Where this shows up

Curbside check-in sits alongside the rest of your check-in rules. For who can take a child home and what happens outside your hours, see attendance settings. To see how check-ins land in the room, see daily attendance. If a save ever refuses to land, check your connection and try again, or email [email protected].