ParentVUE 4+

Update: When are you going to make it possible to copy your child’s other parent (often located in a separate household) on emails? These families number in the millions. You and the school systems are operating off 1950’s assumptions about the US population. You aren’t meeting the needs of today’s families!

The ONLY thing this app does decently is show me my son’s grades. Our district has deemed that we MUST use it in order to communicate with teachers. But the email portion doesn’t work on my iPhone, I can’t copy my son’s father on any communication, and the website doesn’t even work in my phone. So after work, between making dinner for my family,’helping with homework, and doing necessary chores such as laundry, I have to make time to sit down at my laptop to log in. What are parents who can’t afford a computer supposed to do?? We live in a very poor district, one of the worst in the country, and there are so many families who can’t afford a home computer. For the first three weeks of school this year, the school didn’t even KNOW we had to use parentvue, so important emails went unanswered. Why on earth would anyone want to use an app that blocks parent-teacher communication instead of facilitating it?

I have been a software engineer for over 20 years and I have NEVER experience an application that has as many bugs, incomplete, and non-functioning features as this one. This company seriously needs to review its Software Delivery Lifecycle. Tonight alone I have received no less than 30 notifications that I have a new message in ParentVUE, yet when I login and check, there are ZERO new messages. Bonus feature...when I click the back button from my Inbox, the app goes completely haywire and drills all the way down to the first email in my inbox. I tried deleting an old message in my inbox and finally gave up because every time I tried, the app crashed. First day of school and neither of our kids could login to get the message from their teachers on what to do.
Seriously considering writing my own app and selling it to the school district for I’m sure the ridiculous price they charged for this total piece of junk. You really should be ashamed for releasing something of this quality to students and parents.

It is not intuitive where to go find notes from the teacher. I have two children at the same school and notes from one child’s teacher show up as a message under the other child.

Trying to read a message from 9/11 from the teachers shows that after I am done reading, the envelope closed as if it is another new message and the notification remains in the app but I am not receiving notifications outside of the app. It took many clicks to figure out even where to go to get to the message. The message shows up under one of the children but I have to click on messages to read it, if you click on your child, there is no way to get to the message.

I do not understand all these “not due” entries placed in the app for assignments, it seems our children’s school has decided to treat it as an interim grade book rather than specific grades for each actual assignment/test our child takes.