Parents/guardians or Students with provided VPC, ID, and TL information in hand can go to the Parent Portal .net website and click on the Create New Account link. This will take the parent or student through the Registration Process.

During this process, the individual will be asked for their Account Type, Parent or Student. There is no way to prevent students from being able to create accounts as long as parents can create accounts. Students will eventually end up acquiring the VPC, ID, and TL from their parents and will try to sign up for an account of their own. Giving students the option to sign up as students will actually discourage them from signing up as parents. It will not prevent students from registering as parents but will help minimize the occurrences.

Next the parent or student will be prompted for an email address and a password to use for their new account.

After that step, an email will be sent to that email address and the registration process will be halted until they go to their email inbox and click a Confirm link in the email that was sent.

The person can either click on the Confirm or Reject links or, if the links are not active, they can manually go to the URL specified and manually confirm or reject the account.

If they click on the Confirm link, the following webpage will be displayed and they can continue with the registration process.

The registration process will continue with the parent entering in the VPC, ID, & TL for the student they wish to gain access to. If those 3 pieces of information are verified against a STU record in the database, this account will be associated with that student.

The next step in the registration process for parent accounts is listing of every CON record for that student and a prompt for "Which Record Represents You?"

When selected, the account email address will populate the contact record (CON.EM) if blank or overwrite the existing email address on the contact record. Once overwritten, an email will be sent to the old email address informing the owner that the email address stored in Aeries has changed and that if there is concern about this change, they should contact the school.

Now that the account is created and associated, the parent or student can use the login page to login to the system and view the information about their associated student.

A district may already have email addresses stored in the system in the STU.PEM (Parent Email Address), STU.SEM (Student Email Address) or CON.EM (Contact Email Address) fields. If so, before an account is asked to enter the VPC, ID, and TL, the system checks these 3 fields. If a match to the currently verified email address is found, the matching student record will be associated with the current email address/account and will proceed directly to the Emergency Contact Verification step if they are a parent or to the "Done" step if they are a student.

Parent Portal provides a streamlined way for individuals who forgot their password to request a new one. Parent Portal cannot just email the password to the person because all passwords in the system are encrypted with 256-bit hash that can not be decrypted. If a parent or student forgets their password, they can click on the "Forgot Your Password" link on the Parent Portal login page.

Once the link is clicked, the person will be taken to a page where they can enter their email address.

After their email address is entered and after the Go button is clicked, the user gets this message "A confirmation email has been sent. Please close this window and check your email. A link will be provided in the email that will direct you to the proper page on this website." An email is sent to the user that looks like this:

The person can click on the "Click Here" link in the email or can manually go the URL specified and enter the required information. Once the person clicks the link, the system confirms that the process has been followed correctly and allows the individual to enter a new password for their account.

Parent Portal allows an individual parent (or student) account to actually be associated with multiple students. Also, in AeriesCS using a SQL Server database, an account can be associated with multiple students from multiple schools in the district. To add a new student to an account, the user must first log in to Parent Portal. The Parent Portal menu shows Change Student, a dropdown list of students currently assigned to this account are listed as well as the option to Add New Student To Your Account.

The user can click on Change Student and select: Add New Student To Your Account. The user will be taken to a page that will prompt the new student's VPC, ID, and TL.

Once the system confirms the information is correct, a confirmation will be displayed. Choose the correct contact or None of the above.

The user will then see the students added in the Change Student dropdown list and can easily switch between viewing them by clicking on the student's name.