The school lifecycle

A school has two states that are easy to confuse, and the console only ever shows one of them. This page is about the platform's.

The five states

State	What it means
PROVISIONING	The record exists; the school is not yet running
ACTIVE	Provisioned, and its people can sign in
SUSPENDED	Paused by the platform, deliberately and reversibly
TERMINATED	Ended. Final: there is no transition out of it
FAILED	Provisioning did not complete

The transitions

PROVISIONING -> ACTIVE
ACTIVE       -> SUSPENDED
SUSPENDED    -> ACTIVE | TERMINATED
TERMINATED   -> (nothing)

The console offers exactly these and lets the boundary refuse anything else, rather than presenting five states four of which would fail. Creating a school and provisioning it are deliberately separate acts: creation is one operation and provisioning is another, so a created school begins in PROVISIONING until someone provisions it.

The other state, which is not this one

A school also has an academic state: its year is a draft before it starts, active while it runs, and its terms end. That is the school's own fact, recorded in its own application, and it is not what the console shows. A platform operator does not decide whether a school's term is open.

Why the distinction is worth a page

Because an operator reading "active" in the console and "active" in a school's own screen would reasonably assume they mean the same thing. They do not: the console's ACTIVE says the deployment is serving the school, and the school's own active year says the school is teaching. Roles and permissions describes who may move a school between them.