Helping Parents Access Their Student Accounts - Troubleshooting Steps

The Powerschool Parent Portal is what parents use to register a new student, fill out the annual student update form, change their contact information, and to sign up for afterschool activities. For middle and high school students, the parents can view grades, assignments, attendance, etc.

There are two settings that makes this all work. Creating a Web Account for the parent, and giving them permission to access their student's record in the portal.

Parent's Web Account for Logging in to the Parent Portal

This is simply to get them logged into the portal. 

To edit an account click on the Edit Contact button.

Here is where you select the email that will be used for the forgot password function.

if a parent's account is locked from too many login attempts, you will unlock the account using the Account Enabled box.

Use this page to change a parent's password if they are having issues logging in. The new password becomes a temporary password they will have to change while logging into the portal.

The parent needs to have permission to access their student(s) accounts via the parent portal. We assign permission on the parent's contact record in the Student's section. Powerschool calls this Data Access.

See below that this parent has permission to access Daisy and Donald's accounts but not Jennifer's. This is because Data Access is checked for Daisy and Donald, but not for Jennifer. 

When this happens a parent will say "I can see my other students but not Jennifer." This is a clue that the parent does not have permission to the student's account.

To give the parent permission to the student's account, click on the pencil under the Action column.  You will see the screen below that has 3 tabs. 

Active tab:

Enter the relationship if it is wrong or blank. 

Leave Start and End Dates blank.

Verify and check the appropriate check boxes. This is VERY important as you wouldn't want to show a parent as having custody when they don't. This could cause problems as you can imagine. Same for School Pickup.  Make sure the data is correct in the first 4 check boxes. 

The parent is NEVER an Emergency Contact because we want two emergency contacts besides the parents. 

Data Access tab:

The first item on this tab must be checked for the parent to have permission to access a student's record in the parent portal.

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