Recently, I had the opportunity to interact with a parent user of our web service over a series of emails. The contact was initiatied by the parent using the Feedback link in our product. Her (at least I think it was a her) point in the feedback message was about adding the ability in Connected.info for a step-parent to be treated as a parent in Connected, but not with exactly the same privelages that a parent had. This peaked my curiousity and I sent an email asking a few questions about her concern and a proposal for what we might do about the situation.
This sparked a series of emails which really illuminated the issue for me. Before I describe the issue, I would like to compliment the parent on having a very good attitude about the validity of the involvement of a step-parent in a child’s life. I thought her attitude was refreshing.
That said, here is the situation. The custodial parent (the one who wrote the note) has remarried and the step-parent in the household with the child would like to have access to the features of Connected that allow the viewing of grades and homework assignments for the child. The non-custodial parent also has remarried, and the new spouse of that parent would also like the same visibility.
In Connected.info, we drive a lot of our relationships and group memberships from the data stored in the student management system. We do this to make Connected.info more immediately useful for a user. The idea being that if there is less configuration to do on the part of the user, there is more perceived value in the software. Some student management systems do a better job at identifying parental and legal guardian status than others. In the case of Powerschool, many schools use the “custom field” capability of that student management system to note “special” relationships where they exist. So, it is possible for Connected.info to identify step-parents when the school district notes them.
But, what if the school district does not note them? How would such a relationship be identified and an appropriate user status be given to a step-parent in Connected.info? The request that the parent I interacted with had was to allow her to grant “parental” status to another user. There are some advantages to that, but shouldn’t the non-custodial parent have a say in whether this was ok? What if there are court orders preventing the non-custodial parent’s spouse from having access? This turned into a thorny issue.
The second issue we discussed was the issue of how much access to grant, and specifically, what was seen on the “family calendar” by the step-parents. I explained that the “family calendar” was essentially a view of events present on individual family members calendars and any groups those users belonged to. So, then, the question of what constituted the family came up. Is the family the superset of the custodial parent’s household AND the non-custodial parent’s household? Clearly, there are issues with that. Is the “family” then the set of events that only the child is involved in? That is probably not complete enough a set of events.
What seemed to be the best solution was for the “family calendar” of the custodial parent’s household include events from the individual members of the household and the groups they belong to, but not events that only appear on the non-custodial parent’s household members calendars.
One last issue that came up was that of the child’s calendar view. Since the child is both a member of the custodial parent’s household as well as the non-custodial parent’s household, shouldn’t their “family calendar” view show all the events from both households? That is, when they sign in as themself, what evens show on their calendar? The parent I was interacting with via email agreed that a combined view was appropriate for the child. In fact, she felt that there was value in both parents being able to see events scheduled by the other parent that affected the child. However, privacy issues would normally prevent that from being practical.
I found this a fascinating conversation about an area that really does not get enough attention in school oriented software.
