Portal Forms

What are Portal Forms?

Quick answer: Portal Forms are the forms enrolled families fill out inside their authenticated Parent Portal. They know who the parent is, which children belong to them, and what data is on file — so parents only fill out what we don't already know.

Why they exist

You may already use a generic web form for prospect intake (lead capture, tour requests). Those are contact and registration forms — they work great for the public-facing side of your school. But once a family is enrolled, public web forms fall short in three ways:

• They don't know who the parent is. A public form is anonymous until submitted — the parent has to retype their name, email, and phone every single time.
• They don't know which student. Most school forms are about one specific child: a permission slip, a medical update, a field trip. A public form has no concept of "which of my kids is this for?"
• They can't collect signatures or files cleanly. Real school forms need parent signatures, sometimes photo uploads. Public forms can technically capture these but the workflow is clunky and the data ends up scattered.

Portal Forms solve all three because they live inside the authenticated portal — we already know which family is logged in, which students belong to that family, and what we already have on file.

What you can do with them

A Portal Form is a flexible building block. Use them for:

• Permission slips (cafe worker, field trip, photography release)
• Medical updates (allergies, medications, emergency contacts)
• Authorization forms (pickup list, custody notes)
• Acknowledgements (parent handbook, code of conduct, tuition agreement)
• Anything that today requires a parent to print, sign, scan, and email back

What makes them different

• Per-student scoping. A family with three children fills out a per-student form three times, once per child, with the right student auto-selected each time.
• Pre-filled fields. Parent name, student name, date of birth, today's date — all auto-filled. Parents only fill what we don't already know.
• Drawn or typed signatures. Parents can sign with their finger on mobile, or type their full legal name. Both are timestamped and stored as part of the submission.
• File uploads. Need an immunization record or insurance card? Forms can accept PDFs and images, stored securely and accessible only to your school.
• Automatic completion tracking. A dashboard widget shows you exactly which families have submitted, which are pending, and which students are missing what.
• Growth Suite writeback. Form answers flow into the parent's record in Growth Suite, so automations and workflows can fire off the same data.

What about my old paper forms?

You don't have to rebuild them all at once. Most schools start with the two or three forms they collect every year — the handbook acknowledgement and the authorized pickup list are the usual candidates — then add more over time as the calendar demands them.

Related articles

• Choosing forms for your school
• Per-student vs per-family forms
• The parent experience