RosarioSIS: a school information system with a scheduler and a gradebook

What a school actually needs, and what RosarioSIS covers

RosarioSIS is described as a Student Information System for school management, and the About section is unusually honest about who it is for. It has been designed to address the most important needs of administrators, teachers, support staff, parents, students and clerical personnel, and it also adds many components not typically found in Student Information Systems. The screenshots in the README make the scope concrete with views for calendars, student information, student schedule, gradebook, attendance, discipline and fees. The system is web-based, so it can be logged into from any Internet connection, and the README says it facilitates decision-making, provides data necessary for reports to the federal or state governments as well as local boards, and affords convenient access to all the stakeholders in a building or district. The licence is the GNU General Public License version 2, and the primary language is PHP with a default branch of mobile, the last push was on 2026-10-17, and the recent releases are v13.0.1 from 2026-10-12, v13.0 from 2026-10-09 and v12.9.4 from 2026-09-02.

  "name": "rosariosis",
  "description": "RosarioSIS Student Information System for school management.",
  "author": "François Jacquet @francoisjacquet",
  "license": "GPL-2.0-or-later",

The package.json carries the licence as GPL-2.0-or-later, which is worth noting next to the README's description of the software as free software released under the GNU General Public License version 2.

The scheduler, which is the part that distinguishes it

Most student information systems treat the schedule as a database table. RosarioSIS treats it as a solver, and the README is specific about how that changes the workflow. The scheduler allows scheduling of entire classes or groups as well as a single student, revisions to a student's schedule can be performed quickly, and scheduling based on a student's requests is extremely efficient. The number that matters to a principal is this: running the scheduler on an entire high school takes minutes instead of hours, so it can be run several times a day, which allows more thorough scheduling. There is also a test mode. Each time you save a student's requests the scheduler is run under test mode for that student, which lets a staff member resolve conflicts with the student in front of them. Courses can be given weights, instructional assignments and periods, and each course can be marked as requiring attendance, affecting the honor roll and class rank, and having restrictions, with scheduling reports generated from the same application.

Gradebook, eligibility and the marking period model

The gradebook lets teachers establish grade ranges, weight assignments, track assignments, and issue quarterly and semester grades as well as progress reports, with report cards and transcripts also available and configurable to display grades for any or all of your school's marking periods on the fly. Eligibility is the feature that middle grade and high school educators are described as appreciating, since it removes the need for paper or spreadsheets to report which students are eligible for athletic or academic activities; the gradebook determines electronically whether a student is passing, and the teacher then verifies the information and sends it through the system. The school set-up screen establishes marking periods, grade levels in the building, and the number of periods scheduled each day, and the README is unusually specific that schools can have any number of marking periods in three tiers, giving the conventional two semesters, four quarters, four progress periods model as the example, or a system with 3 semesters, 18 quarters and 36 progress periods, with everything completely customisable. Student search goes beyond demographics to schedule, activities, absences, eligibility, grades, GPA and class rank.

Attendance, billing and the rest of the module set

Attendance is taken electronically by teachers and submitted to the office almost instantly, with office staff able to modify attendance reports based on information not available at the time roll was taken. The component provides report capabilities to identify average daily attendance, produce daily attendance summaries and track attendance each day. Employee screens give quick access to demographic information and also assign email addresses, admittance to the system and passwords. Student billing is handled by assigning fees and their corresponding payments, with balances, daily transactions and printable statements. A calendar details events, activities and student assignments, and the README points at a full set of additional modules and plugins to expand communication, reports, data import and integrations with other solutions. Discipline, shown in the screenshot list, is another area the system covers, and Moodle appears among the repository's topics.

Installing it, and the requirement list that is easy to misread

The README is short on installation detail and the detail it does give is worth reading carefully. The minimum requirements are PHP 5.5.9 and PostgreSQL 9.2 or MySQL 5.6 or MariaDB, and for installation directions you are told to consult the INSTALL.md file. The repository carries that file plus INSTALL_es.md and INSTALL_fr.md, so the install guide is localised the same way the application is. The version numbers look dated, and the reason is that they are floors rather than recommendations: the code has been kept compatible with very old PHP so that a school running an old host can still run it. The configuration model is plain files at the root, with database.inc.php holding the connection settings, config.inc.sample.php as the template, and InstallDatabase.php and a rosariosis.sql alongside a MySQL variant to set up the schema. The project also publishes an online demonstration so you can click through the interface before installing anything, plus a documentation site with a Quick Setup Guide, user manuals, report samples, tips and a wiki, and the official site is available in English, Spanish and French.

The limits, and the alternative to weigh

Three things to weigh before committing a school. The first is the technology era. This is a traditional server-rendered PHP application with the file structure of an older style of web app, with modules/, functions/, classes/, locale/ and a Gruntfile for asset minification, rather than a modern API-first stack. For a school that wants to expose its data to other systems, that means writing the integration yourself, and the add-on plugins are the extension point rather than an API. The second is the floor of PHP 5.5.9, which is a benefit for an old host and a liability for a new one, because it is a promise about the codebase that is hard to unwind. The third is scope: this is a whole school system, so a district that only needs a gradebook, or one that already runs a large SIS, is paying for machinery it will not use. The alternative to weigh is a smaller, newer tool such as a standalone gradebook, which is easier to maintain but has no scheduler, no eligibility engine and no billing, and those three are precisely where a secondary school's administration time actually goes.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt RosarioSIS if you run a school or district that needs a full student information system rather than a gradebook alone, because the scheduler, eligibility checks, marking period setup and student billing are the parts that are hard to find elsewhere. Do not adopt it if you only need assignment grading with a modern API in front, since the interface is a traditional server-rendered PHP application. Before you deploy, read INSTALL.md and the minimum requirement of PHP 5.5.9 with PostgreSQL 9.2 or MySQL 5.6 or MariaDB, and try the online demonstration before committing a school to it.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. francoisjacquet/rosariosis on GitHub
2. License: GPL-2.0
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases