Every person connected to your food service program — students who eat, staff who run the POS, guardians who receive updates — has a record in Gaia. This article explains the four types of people records and how guardian, sibling, and household relationships work.
The Four Person Types
Student: a K-12 student enrolled in the district. Students carry eligibility status, an account balance, allergens, dietary restrictions, grade level, homeroom, and guardian relationships.
Staff: a school employee. Staff can authenticate at POS terminals with a PIN and may be priced at a staff rate. Staff records also identify who ran a given POS session.
Guardian: a parent or guardian linked to one or more students. Guardians don't have their own Gaia login.
Unidentified: a placeholder created when an eligibility document references a student Gaia can't yet match to an existing record. These stay in place until someone links them to a real student. See Eligibility Documents and Uploads for the matching workflow.
How People Get Into Gaia
Three ways: a bulk roster upload at the start of the year (see Download and Upload Your Roster), adding one person by hand (see Add a Student or Staff Member), or automatically as a placeholder when a meal application names a student Gaia can't match yet.
Guardian Relationships
A student can be linked to one or more guardians through a relationship record. Three relationship types:
Primary: the main contact. A student needs at least one primary guardian on file for eligibility updates to reach the family.
Secondary: an alternate contact. Optional.
Other: covers relationships like siblings, linking two students to the same household.
Sibling relationships are mirrored automatically: link Student A to Student B as a sibling, and Student B's record updates with the reverse link on its own.
A guardian record can be created automatically when you set up a student relationship, or created first and linked to a student afterward.
Households
A Household ID groups students who live in the same household. It's usually the family or household number from your student information system. Students with the same Household ID belong to the same household, even when no guardian or sibling link connects them on their profiles.
You can add a Household ID from a student's Add Student or Edit Student form, or for many students at once with the Household ID column in your roster download and upload. It shows on the student profile, under State ID. Only students have a Household ID; staff records don't.
The Households tab
The Households tab on the Free & Reduced page lists households whose students don't all have the same eligibility status. Gaia counts students as one household when they share a Household ID, live at the same home address, or are linked to each other on their profiles. Students with different Household IDs are never grouped by address, and different apartment numbers count as different households. A student with no active eligibility counts as Paid.
Gaia never changes eligibility from this list. Click a student's name to open their profile and update them there, for example when you extend direct certification to a certified student's brothers and sisters (see Direct Certification). If some students have no home address on file, the tab tells you how many, since they can't be grouped by address.