Overview

This site documents portal.bronxconservatory.org, the operations portal of the Bronx Conservatory of Music (BCM). BCM is a non-profit that provides private music instruction of the highest quality to Bronx children and adults, in their own neighborhoods, at the lowest possible tuition — making conservatory training accessible to all.

The portal centralizes the conservatory’s day-to-day operations for everyone involved: parents, students, teachers, and administrators. It is a PHP/MySQL application; all SQL lives in manager classes under www/lib/, pages follow a foo.php (render) / foo_eval.php (POST handler) convention, and every write action is recorded in an activity log.

The big ideas

A few concepts organize the whole system:

The semester is the organizing unit. Everything — schedules, lessons, pricing, and money — belongs to a semester (a season + year, e.g. Fall 2026). Each semester carries its own fees and its own calendar of teaching dates per location.
Reservations generate lessons. A reservation is a weekly recurring slot (teacher + location + day + time) held for a student for a whole semester. When an admin confirms it, the system generates one lesson row per actual calendar date and posts the semester’s charges to the student’s ledger. Teachers’ non-teaching time (lunch, breaks) works the same way via hold blocks.
Money is a ledger. Balances are never a single number in a column — they are the sum of debit and credit entries, each tied to a student and a semester, so every balance is explainable line by line. Payments flow through Stripe.
Prospects are staged as leads. The public registration and inquiry forms never create live accounts. They create leads, which an admin reviews and converts into real family accounts.
Roles are derived, not stored. A person is a teacher because they have a teacher profile, a parent because they are linked to a child — not because of a role column. One person can be several things at once.

How this documentation is organized

Data Model — the database schema, table by table, for readers comfortable with SQL. Split into eight categories with a page each.
User Model — how the five kinds of users (parent, teacher, student, admin, developer) are represented and resolved.
User Registration — the two public intake forms: the Inquiry Form and the Registration Form.
Parent Experience, Teacher Experience, and Student Experience — what each role sees and does.
Admin Experience — the administrative pages, plus a detailed page for each key flow: creating a semester, managing the schedule and calendar, processing and converting leads, and handling money.

Design principles

The portal’s design follows three principles from BCM leadership:

Warm, not institutional. Real photos, warm language, the BCM gold-and-navy brand, and a visible phone number — (718) 841-7415 — on every page.
Simple enough for a phone between lessons. Every screen must make sense in under 10 seconds: four cards for parents, three for students, one main view for teachers.
Earn trust before asking for money. Many BCM families are cautious about online payments. The “Pay Now” button is the last thing in the flow, not the first.