Community *Smart* Group for Students and their Parents

Hi, @Michael Clark! We have quite a few continuous Community Groups setup for various purposes. If the group is truly targeted at parents in its purpose, then we make the group a parent group. If the group is truly targeted at students in its purpose, then we make the group a student group, and we have our Group Page Access setup in a way that allows parents to have full access to the groups of their students. To be clear, student groups don't appear in the groups list at the top of the parent screen since those are reserved for the parent's own groups, but they get to the students' groups by selecting their student in the upper-left and then navigating the various student subtabs. (This is very similar to the way parents would interact with a student's “class" where the class doesn't appear in the parent's own class menu unless they happen to be a teacher, but instead, they access the student's classes through the student.)

I will warn you that one notable difference is that the student community group owner cannot push out a bulk message to the parents from the group roster. (In classes, even though the parent isn't enrolled in the class, teachers CAN still push out bulk messages to parents of the registered students.) However, parents can subscribe to email/text notifications for any announcements, news, etc. posted to their students' community groups which does still allow a type of bulk communication with parents since we subscribe parents to these at the start of each academic year.

There are several ideas in the IdeaBank about adding the ability to bulk message parents of students in a student community group, and I've already voted and commented on some of those, so you might want to do the same!