Parent Portal best practice

[Nathan McArthur]

Hi all,

I am setting up parent portal access, and I have the form letter pulling all the data, and it looks great. I tested it with a teacher who has kids. No problems. But is there a best practice for having parents sign up? The form letter with the confidential ID and passcode poses a security risk, as it would allow anyone with a valid email address to sign up and view the students' data. I am OK to proceed as is, but if there are better, newer, flashier ways, I wanted to check. Thanks all. 

Nate

[Kyle Schneider]

Honestly, my recommended practice is to have a staff member create the parent account and link the kids to it, (set the username to be the same as their email address), and then pull up an incognito browser window and trigger a password reset email to the parent. Then you just have to tell them that their username is their email address, and to look for an email to set their password.

—
Kyle Schneider
GSD Educational Services
Phone: 907-917-4149
ky...@gsded.com

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[The Chad]

Our methodology is very close to what Kyle suggested.

When parents need an account made or student added to it, school administrative assistants do it via Contacts.

They also handle a number of password resets, because parents seldom receive the reset email from Powerschool.

We still check "Enable Parent Access", but leave Access ID and Access Password blank.

[Everett Cook]

We have noticed that hotmail and outlook accounts do not receive the emails. We have let the parents know that their email will not receive the confirmation so we just go in and change the email address submit and change it back to bypass the confirmation email.

__________________________________________________________________________________________
		Everett Cook
		Technology Director		Southeast Island School District
	A	P.O. Box 19569; 1010 Sandy Beach Rd, Thorne Bay, AK 99919
	O	(907) 828-8254 ext 217	M	(907) 401-1917	E	evc...@sisd.org
	W	http://www.sisd.org
SISD Vision:		“Students are equipped to realize their dreams and aspirations”
SISD Mission:		“Together we will foster students' skills to achieve their goals and adapt to an ever changing world.”

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[Jim Shreve]

I have had a great experience utilizing the Parent Access Accounts Express PAX plugin (download ID: 1243). The plugin streamlines the entire Parent Access account creation process. The plugin has a built-in form letter that is sent as an email when you create accounts via the plugin, allows password reset sent from the plugin, and linking of additional students to existing accounts is super easy. I highly recommend it. Our parent portal use increased by over 50% after we started using the PAX plugin.

The only drawback I see is that the plugin only functions at the District Office level, so a limited number of users would have access to it.

Jim Shreve

Director of Technology

Nome Public Schools

New Number: (907)443-8931

jims...@nomeschools.org

"In brightest day, in blackest night

No evil shall escape my sight

Let those who worship evil's might

Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!"

Hal Jordan's / Green Lantern mantra, DC Comics (1959)

On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 1:48 PM The Chad <Chad....@k21schools.org> wrote:

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