How Edsby defines and manages parental relationships

Edsby has been designed specifically to solve the vexing problem of managing parental accounts in the world of blended families.

The problem is actually much more complex than it sounds, as there are many, many subtleties in making this work correctly in the real world.

Edsby works in the following manner:

Each student may have zero or more “parent” accounts associated with their account.
The parent accounts each have a specific relationship assigned (e.g. father, mother, step-father, guardian, uncle, parole officer, etc.). This relationship is typically synchronized from various enterprise data sources in the school/district.
If you don’t currently track this data, Edsby has an interface allowing staff to add parental accounts right in Edsby.

In addition, each parent has a set of rights associated with a particular student, as defined in the SIF standard:

This parent is the legal guardian of the student
This parent has pickup rights for the student
This parent lives with the student
This parent has access to records
This parent has custody
This parent is a disciplinary contact
This parent provides primary care
This parent receives email notifications
Emergency contact order (parents will be displayed to the school staff in this order, if set)

If the rights are available (e.g. in the SIS), these may be synced from school or district data sources, but may also be set directly using the Edsby interface, based on the policy of the district (e.g. only a principal can change parental access rights).

If the rights include the “Access to records” right, the parent will be able to see the student’s upcoming and past work.

All of the parental data in Edsby, including the relationship and rights codes, are available for export. This is particularly useful if your school or district wants to use the parental data for other systems.

Can Edsby help manage parent/student/teacher/principal communication?

Edsby provides a secure, non-Internet messaging system between various stakeholders on the system. Furthermore, Edsby provides extensive messaging control, including:

the ability to allow/disallow student-to-student messaging on a school, grade or age basis
the ability for the teacher to allow or disallow messages from parents
the ability to disallow mail in general but still allow replies

Edsby messages are fully archived, and the Edsby mailbox for each student may be viewed at any time by the student’s principal and guidance staff. The ability for a parent to also view a student’s mailbox may be optionally enabled based on a school, grade or age basis.

In addition to its built-in messaging, Edsby also supports SMTP notification for teachers, staff, and parents, so notification of important messages can be delivered directly to the user’s inbox.