Our school has chosen to disable messaging in order to centralize all school and teacher communications via email.

At present, the process to communicate with parents via email is this:

1. Go to class page
2. Go to roster
3. Click 'Send Communication to' button
4. Choose Parents from the list
5. Open in default email client or copy and paste addresses in Bcc

There are two problems with this:

1. In order to send a larger communication to parents across class sections, you have to go to each individual class page and complete the same steps as above.  There's not a central area that you can quickly gather all the emails for the individuals you want to communicate with outside of just one class.
2. Because of the current setup, the process of emailing groups of parents outside of any individual class section is tedious.

Additionally, while our school has a number of distribution groups for administration, individual class years, etc., we don't want IT to be the ones with the burden of creating and managing all of these groups.  We feel we should be able to use the inherent intelligence and data of the ON system to quickly be able to communicate with all applicable constituents.

As such, we would like to see two features that are present in Messaging make its way for email gathering.  To be clear, we are not looking for a way for our teachers to email groups of parents through ON.  We just want the system and process of gathering the applicable email addresses for email, easier.

1. In Messaging, you can go to a central messaging area.  This a button located at the top of the interface so that it's always quickly accessible and available regardless of where teachers are in the system.
   1. Having a similar Email button at the top would make gathering emails at any time, easier, without having to go to individual class pages or multiple pages.
2. In Messaging, you are able to enter the name of any individual parents & students, class section, etc. with whom you are related to as recipients.
   1. We would need this same functionality in order to populate a list similar to what is achieved in the current email gathering implementation, so we could copy and paste those emails based on our selection (without duplicates!) into an email.

Some additional helpful features within this would be:

1. When entering a class name as a teacher, be able to choose individual sections, or be able to choose all sections of the class s/he teaches, and then from that choose students, parents, and or all members/teachers.
2. When entering these criteria into a "recipients" list, also have an "exclusions" list.  For example, if a teacher has 4 sections of a particular class and only wants to communicate with 3 of them, it would easier to add "Class Name - All my Sections" to recipients and add "Class Name - Section X" to the list of exclusions, rather than having to add each of the 3 desired sections into the recipients list.

While the important problem to solve is for teachers to communicate with parents, these enhancements would certainly make the process of communicating with any group of individuals at the school via email much easier.