One Sync, Half a Million Students: TDSB’s Rostering Transformation

Canada’s largest school board needed more than a rostering fix. Toronto District School Board (TDSB) needed a smarter, more secure way to manage student data across a growing ecosystem of learning applications—without adding to the workload of already stretched IT teams. With Clever, they got exactly that: automated, customizable rostering that eliminated manual data entry, put the right data in the right hands, and set a scalable foundation for their cybersecurity strategy.

Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is Canada’s largest school board, serving students across the Greater Toronto Area. TDSB’s IT team manages a complex technology environment, including PowerSchool as their student information system (SIS), a fleet of Chromebooks, and an expanding suite of learning applications. With thousands of teachers and students relying on digital tools daily, streamlining how user data was managed—and protected—became a strategic priority.

The Challenge: Manual Rostering at Scale

Before Clever, managing roster data at TDSB was labor-intensive and fragmented. Multiple staff members were entering the same information repeatedly across different systems, making customization and control a complex challenge to manage. There was no automated way to turn applications on or off based on the time of year—meaning GoGuardian, for example, would stay active during summer and March breaks unless someone manually intervened.

The problem wasn’t just inefficiency. For example, when teachers logged into GoGuardian to monitor student Chromebook activity, they could see the entire school—not just their own classrooms. Without accurate, class-level rostering, the tool wasn’t delivering on its potential.

TDSB needed a solution that could:

• Share only the minimum data required by each application
• Automate roster data from PowerSchool to learning applications
• Give teachers class-level access—not school-wide visibility
• Enable seasonal sync pausing without disrupting student access

The Solution: Customizable, Application-Level Rostering with Clever

TDSB took a deliberate, collaborative approach to implementation. Their IT team sat down with their SIS team, Clever, and their application partners to map exactly what data each app needed.

Working with Clever and their PowerSchool team, TDSB built a customized API integration that shared only the required data fields for each application. GoGuardian gets one set of data. Canva gets another. Education Perfect gets its own configuration. This application-level customization is a core part of how TDSB approaches data privacy.

“Each application may not need all the same information. So you can customize – just work with teams, have a game plan, and do that for every single application. Just because you did it for one, don’t use that same cookie-cutter approach.” – Tony Venneri, Manager, Application Administration

Setup was fast. A couple of collaborative meetings with the right stakeholders was all it took to get operational. The result: a daily automated sync that pushes updated roster data to connected applications—with zero manual intervention required.

TDSB also uses Clever’s sync pause functionality. During summer break and March break, the school board pauses the sync, freezing data as of the last day of instruction. Students who need access over the summer can still use their applications—while the data stays stable until the new school year.

Security by Design: Layers of Data Protection

Clever’s architecture gave TDSB a clear, auditable security model. Data flows from their PowerSchool SIS into Clever, then from Clever to each connected application—with TDSB controlling exactly what information moves at each step.

This layered  model means TDSB can reduce what any single application receives, pause a specific application’s sync without affecting others, and maintain visibility over what’s shared with whom. The school board also engaged their legal team as part of the implementation process to verify that all shared data met compliance requirements.

The Impact: Simplified Access, Stronger Security, Scalable Foundation

Since implementing Clever, TDSB has seen improvements across IT operations, classroom experience, and data security.

For IT, the shift has been transformative. Manual roster management across multiple systems has been replaced by a single daily sync. What once required multiple team members doing redundant data entry now runs automatically, freeing the team to focus on strategic work rather than maintenance.

For teachers, the change is immediately noticeable. GoGuardian now shows only their classroom—not the whole school. Application access turns on in September and off for breaks, precisely aligned to the school calendar. 

Advice for Other School Boards: Start Focused, Scale Thoughtfully

TDSB’s rollout started with a single application—GoGuardian—before expanding to Canva and Education Perfect, with more applications planned. This phased approach let the team build confidence in the model, work out data-sharing configurations carefully, and add applications when they were ready.

Their advice for other IT leads considering a similar path:

• Involve your SIS team, application vendors, and legal team from the start
• Define minimum data requirements for each application before you connect
• Don’t replicate one application’s configuration across others—customize per app
• Use a phased rollout: start with one application, validate the approach, then expand
• Take advantage of Clever’s free tools—but don’t try to implement everything at once