For a variety of practical and security-related reasons, JumpRope's support team cannot directly support parents and family members in their use of the Family Portal. Much like for students, it is important that the school or district have a support structure in place to provide technical support (e.g. help logging in or changing an incorrect email) as well as answering questions about how to use the portal. JumpRope's support team will do everything possible to support the school or district staff in their efforts to support student and family users.

For this reason, JumpRope requires that the school designate a primary contact for questions about the portal before family accounts can be invited to the Family Portal. The primary contact's name and email address will be provided to portal users within the portal and the welcome email as the best method to get help when required. The primary contact must also have a valid JumpRope account set up in Staff Accounts.

If JumpRope's support team is contacted directly by a student or family account, we will forward the message to the primary contact as soon as possible. If we suspect a technical issue on our end is preventing core functionality of the portal, we will investigate and provide context to staff member to aid in their efforts to help the portal user.

The two main reasons behind our policy to not directly support portal users involved data security and clarify of communication. On the security side, JumpRope's team does not have the ability to verify the identity of family members and thus cannot create or modify account details or permissions without risking exposing confidential student information to the wrong person. When it comes to clear communication, we may not have accurate responses for questions about how to read or interpret student grades, mastery scores, or narrative feedback within the context of the educational philosophy of the school or teacher in question.

For these reasons, we require that the school designate a primary contact for all questions from portal users, and we strongly encourage the school to create a portal user's guide explaining practical and philosophical use of the portal and its data. When in doubt, it's better to delay launching the Family Portal to new users until a robust plan is in place to support users. JumpRope's team is happy to help in this process by providing training resources and example user guides - simply reach out to us via the support system!