School Corral Support

School Corral has no servers of its own. Everything is processed on your phone, and your data syncs only through your own private iCloud account — the same way Photos or Notes does. Nothing goes to us or to any third party.

Everything in the shared household. That means your children, items, due dates and the activity history of who changed what — and it also includes the original material an item came from: the text of a captured email or voice note, and any flyer you scanned, including the photo itself.

Not once it is captured into a shared household — so it is worth thinking about before you scan. If a flyer has another family's details on it, or an email contains something you would rather keep to yourself, it will be visible to everyone in the household, including while the item is still sitting in your Review list before you have confirmed it. There is currently no way to keep an individual item or its source private from a co-parent.

Settings → iCloud shows the last time your phone successfully talked to iCloud. It updates on its own as you use the app — there is nothing you need to do for normal syncing.

There is no switch inside School Corral. The app syncs through your iCloud account, so the way to stop it is to sign out of iCloud in the iOS Settings app. You will find the same explanation in Settings → iCloud in the app.

Check you are both online and both signed in to iCloud. Give it a few seconds — most changes arrive within seconds when both phones are on. If it has been longer, close and reopen the app on both phones; opening the app always triggers a catch-up. Then check Settings → iCloud on both phones for a message explaining why.

The app tells you what is actually wrong rather than asking you to guess. “Sync paused” with a reason means School Corral keeps retrying by itself — there is no button to press and nothing to fix by hand, and your changes are held safely on the phone until it recovers. “iCloud storage is full” means new changes cannot upload until you free up iCloud storage. “You're not signed in to iCloud” means nothing is syncing, though your data is safe on the device and will sync once you sign in. Nothing you can do in the app makes these resolve faster — if one persists for a long stretch with a working connection, get in touch.

No. Changes wait in a queue on your phone and are only marked done once iCloud confirms it has them. That holds across closing the app, restarting the phone, and stretches with no signal.

Give it a minute. Right after a fresh install School Corral is pulling your data back down, and different parts of the screen can briefly disagree with each other while that finishes — a subscription might look inactive for a moment, for instance. If something still looks wrong after a minute or two, open the paywall from Settings and tap Restore Purchases.

Settings → Household sharing → Share with a household member. Invites go to your co-parent's iCloud email address, not a phone number — that is what lets iCloud find their account, and an address that is not attached to an iCloud account will not work. Starting to share requires an active subscription; using School Corral on your own is free, permanently.

Settings → Household sharing → Manage sharing.

They will still show as “invited — not joined” until you remove them yourself in Manage sharing, and until you do, they can rejoin using the same invite. Removing them is a deliberate step, not something that happens automatically when they leave.

Settings → Household sharing → Leave shared household offers two choices, and the owner keeps everything either way. Leave & keep a copy saves the household's children and items to your phone as your own — they stop syncing from that moment, so anything the other parent changes afterwards will not reach you. Leave without keeping removes you and keeps nothing.

It depends on whether you edited the same detail. Edits to different fields of one item both survive — if you change the due date while your co-parent renames it, you will end up with both changes, not one overwriting the other. If you both change the same field within a few seconds, the last one saved wins for that field.

One subscription covers the whole household. If you subscribe, your co-parent gets full access without buying anything themselves.

No — and you should not. A second subscription bills a second Apple ID and adds nothing at all. School Corral tries hard to stop this happening: once anyone in your household is subscribed, the option to buy disappears for everyone else, and the paywall tells you who is already covering it.

Only the Apple ID that bought the subscription can manage billing, and only the household owner can invite or remove members. This follows Apple's own rules — a purchase belongs to the Apple ID that made it. We would suggest this be a parent's account rather than a caregiver's, since whoever holds it effectively controls both the household membership and the subscription.

Sharing is the paid feature, so a lapsed subscription pauses changes in a shared household: you can still open the app and read everything, and you can still delete things, but adding, editing and completing items are paused until it is active again. Using School Corral on your own is always free and never pauses.

Most often this is a fresh install still catching up — see “I reinstalled the app” above. Tap Restore Purchases on the paywall. If it still looks wrong afterwards, get in touch.

Usually, yes — but when a single email, flyer or voice note packs several separate to-dos into one paragraph, School Corral can occasionally miss or merge one. If something you captured looks like it named more things than turned up as items, it is worth a glance back at the original — you can reopen the scanned image or the full captured text from the item itself at any time.

AI capture requires an iPhone with Apple Intelligence turned on. Manual entry works on all supported iPhones.