The default behaviour in QuickSchools for communications between teacher and parent is to allow full access. With the new Sprint D12 release, school administrators can now limit this interaction. This might be useful if you find that teachers or parents accidentally send messages to the wrong people. There are 2 modules that now have support for restricting teacher-parent messaging:

• Private Messaging
• Mass (Parent) Messaging

Restricting Private Messaging

When Private Messaging is enabled for the Parent Portal, the system enables a Teacher Directory. When configuring the Parent Portal, there is now an additional option for “Parents can only send messages to teachers of their enrolled child”. This setting is available under “Settings” > “Turn Features On / Off”, when you click “Configure” for the Parent Portal module:

With the setting turn on, the Teacher Directory will still display a full listing of teachers, but the “Send Message” link will only appear for teachers that are teaching students for that parent:

Additionally, when creating a new Private Message (using the conversation bubble on the top right), the dropdown will only include teachers that parents should have access to:

Conversely, this also applies to teachers creating private messages to parents as well:

Restricting Mass Parent Messaging

When configuring the “Mass Parent Messaging” module, there is now an additional option for “Teachers can only send messages to parents of their enrolled students”:

With this option enabled, regular users with access to the Mass Parent Messaging feature will only be able to send messages to the students and subjects that they are teaching. Note however that Recipient Lists are currently still shared site-wide. So any recipient lists that you create will be accessible to other users with access to the Mass Messaging module:

Feel free to try those out! We highly recommend that teachers use QuickSchools to engage parents in the education of the students. Please chat in (or comment below) with questions or comments.