You can load and update participants and staff from a spreadsheet: download your current roster, edit it, and upload it back. Gaia shows you exactly what the file will change before anything is saved.
To add or edit one person at a time, see Managing the Student Roster. Eligibility paperwork is a separate tool; see Eligibility Documents and Uploads.
Districts on an automatic nightly feed from a student information system do not need this. That feed continues to run.
Quick answer
Always download your current list first. It already has everyone's ID filled in, and that ID is how Gaia knows who is who. A file built from scratch creates duplicates instead of updating people.
Every upload adds or updates. It never removes anyone. Leaving someone out of a file changes nothing about them.
Nothing saves until you apply. Gaia checks the file first and shows you what is new, what changed, what stayed the same, and what it cannot load.
Deactivating is not deleting. The person keeps their record, balance, and history, and can come back on it.
1. Download your current list
Go to Students > Accounts. Use the Students or Staff toggle to pick which roster you want, then click Download current list.
The file holds that entire roster, including deactivated people. It is not limited to whatever you have filtered on screen.
2. Edit the file
The file opens on a sheet called Roster, with a column for each field: ID, First Name, Last Name, Person Type, Status, Site, Grade Level, Homeroom, Date of Birth, Gender, Address, City, State, and Zip.
The ID column is shaded. Leave it alone. For students it is usually the student ID from your student information system. For anyone you add, put in whatever unique ID you use. It has to be unique across participants, staff, and guardians together.
Person Type, Status, Site, and Grade Level are dropdowns, filled with your district's own sites and grade groups. Pick from the list rather than typing, and the spreadsheet flags a value that does not match.
A blank cell means no change. Clearing Site or Status keeps what the person already has. It never erases anything. This is what makes a partial file safe: a file with only the five people you added this week touches nobody else.
Change a cell to update someone, add a row to add someone, and set Status to Inactive or Active to deactivate or reactivate. Save the file when you are done.
Allergens and dietary restrictions are not in this file, so a bulk upload cannot overwrite them. They stay on the person's record.
3. Upload the file
Back on the Students page, click Upload roster. Confirm whether you are loading Students or Staff, click Choose file, and pick your saved file. Excel (.xlsx) and CSV (.csv) are both accepted. Then click Upload & check.
4. Review the preview
Gaia opens the Roster Import Preview and tells you how many rows it is checking. Nothing is saved at this point. Every row lands in one of four groups, and you can click a group to see just those rows.
New: people this file will create.
Changed: people this file will update. The Details column names the field and shows the old value and the new one, for example Site: — > Lakeside Horizon Middle School.
Unchanged: people who matched with nothing different.
Can't load: rows Gaia will skip, each with the reason.
If Gaia shows an amber warning that almost every row is landing as a new person, stop. None of the rows matched an existing ID, which usually means the file was built without downloading your current list first. Applying it would create duplicates. Close the preview, download your list, and start again.
Check the Can't load group before you go on. A row cannot load when a required field is missing (first name, last name, and ID are all required), when the same ID appears twice in your file, when an ID matches more than one person already in Gaia, or when a new row has no person type. Fix those rows and upload again; the rest are unaffected.
5. Apply the changes
When the preview looks right, click Apply changes. The people load, and you will see them on the Students page.
If something is wrong, Upload a different file lets you swap the file without starting over, and Close discards the whole thing. Nothing was written, so there is nothing to undo.
Making more changes later
Download the list again each time, so you are working from what Gaia has now. Upload the edited file the same way. Rows you did not touch come back as Unchanged, the rows you edited come back as Changed, and nobody is duplicated.
A participant deactivated in June who appears in your September file as Active is reactivated on their existing record, with their history intact, as long as their ID is unchanged.
Deactivating and reactivating without a file
For a handful of people you do not need a file at all. Tick them on the Students page and use Deactivate or Reactivate in the toolbar that appears.