ParentSquare

I feel the app could make improvements on accessibility and ease of use. When clicking on posts or attachments. It stays loading, and nothing ever pops up. It's frustrating to manage. Any important information gets emailed directly to me, but nothing ever shows on the app. When logged in, I can see my profile and who my child is. But when trying to access posts made from teachers, it shows a child that is not mine and therefore denies me access. I've used class dojo for years with no problems.

This app works great when you manage to get into it and has many good features for students and teachers... but I had the hardest time getting into this. It kept saying it sent a verification code but I was getting nothing, ever time I tried to get in, it said "an unexpected error has occurred" and when it did finally work it kept kicking me out.

At first, we loved the app. Our school had used it since we started there in 2023. Being able to easily see class newsletters or sign up for things was great, and contacting teachers is easier. But this school year we've both had notifications randomly stop, pictures can't be enlarged in any way, and messages get covered by the keyboard if you have to go back to fix something. Before this, it would have been 5 stars.

I have multiple kids it's hard to sift through and find messages. You literally have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find what you're looking for. Also, it's hard to zoom in on things. I personally would prefer to just email. Email is so much easier you can organize it into folders mark important ones it automatically adds things to your calendar, it's in the order in which it's received and most importantly you can search for things! I can't stand parent square!

Has the ability to be good but far from it. As a teacher, it's very confusing to use. Ways to make a Post and create messages to class are in completely different places. Only admin has access to see if messages were read but teachers don't. Dashboard says that 90% of our school is receiving posts, but most of the parents aren't getting them. When teacher gets notification they have a message, it's difficult to find it in the list. The color choices are awful. But great edit tools!

Clicking on notifications doesn't take you to the new message/post. Instead you end up going to the message/post you were previously looking at. There is no way to save a draft of a message. You cannot search through previous messages. When moving away from a draft before sending it, it doesn't prompt you that you're about to lose it either. App sporadically sends you message notifications. Sometimes people write to you and you aren't notified.

Recently, I have been having a strange issue with this app regarding notifications. Very suddenly, I am unable to receive notifications from the app, only via email and text. No matter how many times I go into settings and try to enable app notifications, it turns off by itself. I thought maybe something was wrong with my permissions settings on my phone, but everything is enabled there. I really want this issue resolved as I much prefer push notifications.

It's nice to have notifications instantly, but functionally it is not easy to use especially for teachers. It's easy to send messages to parents and classes but very difficult to send messages to other teachers or staff and EXTREMELY difficult to find past messages. The sign up feature is also easy to use but VERY limited compared to other options available for free. I can think of several other options that I would recommended before this. I am using both the Android app and PC with same result

Clunky, hard to navigate, hard to find old messages, to actually take surveys, etc, I have to go to the website instead of the app, contacting anyone through the app is difficult except as a reply to a message but the teachers say to do it that way, oh and then they don't see the messages. Basically, I think the school made a poor choice and now we are all stuck with it. 4/15 update: still a disaster

Never works for media. I can't believe how much trouble this app has given me. I love to post videos and pictures throughout the week to show my students' parents and it always says unable to attach media. I emailed the company and reached out for support, it took them about 3 weeks to finally have their programmers " fix" what was wrong but it still didn't work. If you use it on your desktop, it seems to work better. Seesaw and ClassDojo were so much more functional as far as sharing media.

It is so time consuming to communicate through this app. I get an email from my kid's school telling me there's an important message, so I click the link in the email, log in to the app, find the message I'm trying to read, click the link to download the message, and finally 10 minutes later I read one sentence that could have been sent in the initial email. I mean seriously, it should not be that complicated to remind us that tomorrow the kids have early dismissal or whatever.

Wonderful tool for communication with school. The latest version has a weird behavior when writing a message. The message is deleted if the phone screen changes from portrait into landscape during typing. The app should lock into portrait mode only if this is going to happen. Or offer the option to save as draft. I've lost at least three messages this past week because of this. And I'm sure that was not the case before

App frequently stops. If it properly functioned all would be well. I do not have the time or patience to have to retry signing documents over and over again to later face a deadline from the public school for signed documents that their app should have worked the first time I tried. There has to be a better platform than this. Truthfully, I'd prefer to have to physically sign things brought home from my student over this garbage any day. At least I could submit them before deadlines that way.

Long email chains and can't save images. I want to like this app but two main features that I use a lot stop me: when you get the messages in email form you get every single message in that thread so it's super long. The second issue is that images that are shared in the app can't be saved. I think it's a bug but they haven't fixed it in months.

Wayyyy to many notifications. I changed the settings to only get an email daily and not get constant notifications but I'm still getting flooded with emails and notifications on my phone. Good app other than that. EDIT-- Even after selecting said digest option, I get 6 emails a day, and notifications at every single post. 1 at the end of the day would be fine, but this is overkill. Parents have more to do than read posts 24/7.

Use it because I have no choice. No granular controls for notifications by channel or even just to make them silent - it's all or nothing. Clunky interface, very slow, no offline caching, basically what you'd expect from software sold to people other than end users - i.e. no focus on UX since the people using it don't pay/choose to do so.

It was great in the fall (2021), but I've had several issues in the past month or two. It seems like it became less intuitive. When I open the app it now defaults to a page that rarely has relevant information, which adds extra clicks in order to get to the posts I'm looking for. Annoying. Last month I also realized I was not getting some critical alerts from the school district, but it was not obvious what settings I needed to change.

Sometimes not the easiest to navigate. It would be nice to have all of the staff that your child deals with accessible, not just the 1-6 that are their standard subject teachers. Like Speech, Chorus-band-music, eld, librarian, and maybe the pod staff. That is my only negative feedback. Otherwise, the system is amazing. This last year especially because the response time was so fast.

Most days I'm just looking at the 'loading' circle. When I send messages, I can't always Submit them because "submit" disappears. Update 2 yrs later... I hate it even more now. Eventhough I've updated all of my instant notification settings for email, text, and app, I'm still receiving notices 24 hrs after the school sends them out. I hate that so many schools depend on this type of communication. Important information has been missed more than a few times now.

No tech support. Too many notifications. It mainly uses a browser so why bother? I just got an email telling me to update ParentSquare but it doesn't even tell you what version to ensure you are running (Android) despite the time I spent reading all their directions. I hope we ditch this "app" before the next school year.