Preferred database design method for assigning user roles? (Hats vs. Groups)

Question

I have medium sized MySQL database with a primary \"persons\" table which contains basic contact information about every human being connected to the theatre and theatre school

Answer 1

I might change teachers to employees and add employee type.

However in no way shape or form would I ever store email, address, phone in the person table. These should all be separate tables of their own as people have multiple email addresses (work and home), multiple phone numbers (work, home, cell, fax) and multiple addresses (work, home1, home 2, school, etc.). I would put each in its own table and assign a type to it so you can identify which is what type of address, phone, etc.

Also for address, email, phone you might want a flag to identify which is the the main record to use for contacting first. We cal ours correspondence and it is a boolean that is kept up-to-date with a trigger as each person who has a record must have one and only one correspondence, so if it changes, the old one must automatically be reset as well as the new one go in and if it is the first record it is set automaticially and if the correspondence reciord is deleted , it will be assigned to the another one if there are remaining records.