"View Only" Parental Access without Edit Access (Divorce Situations)

At preset, a user either has "Parental Access" or they don't: either they can "view and edit", or they "cannot view" student profile information. The development team's vision appears to view parents as either engaged or estranged with nothing in between.

Schools could benefit from a "middle path" with "view only" parental access.


Parental access is required for a user to:

  • Edit the student's profile (according to profile relationship access settings in Core)

  • Get student-specific emails

  • Get official notes pertaining to the student

  • See the student's classes, advisories, athletic teams, and teachers

  • See the students assignments, gradebook grades, report cards and transcripts


Many of the above points are important to parents, but in the current system it's all or nothing.


We have experienced several situations where we've been asked to allow a parent to see all of this information, as long as they can't edit the contact card, but unfortunately this is an impossible request.


The system capabilities here are surprisingly black and white given how complex most divorce situations are, please consider implementing this feature request.

  • Ben Craft
  • Aug 30 2022
K-12 Core / User Management
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  • Ben Craft commented
    August 30, 2022 15:37

    Additional info for anyone investigating this issue in the future, here are things I've already tried at length, both individually and with the help of Blackbaud's support team members:


    Clone the parent role: Unfortunately you can't clone constituent roles, only edit them. Meaning you could change the ability for all parents school-wide to view-only with no edit access for their children, but you cannot simply create a cloned parent role for the minority who request this "view only" access for their ex-spouse.


    Use a relationship type that is not previously in use (such as "Custodian"), and set specific "profile relationship access" in Core to "View Only" for everything that the parent can view and edit: Despite setting profile relationship access for "Custodian to Student" it does not actually work unless the custodian also has parental access...which takes us to the above situation about editing the profile access for all parents at the school.


    If you have any other ideas for how this could work, please chime in.

    Also I'd like to express my appreciation for the patience and help of the Blackbaud support team. Over the last couple years I've thought through this situation with a few different team members and we've all given it our level best, but so far the current system capabilities appear to make a "view only" fix or even a shoddy workaround impossible.

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