Product

ContactPortal

Parents own the correctness of their family's data, not your school office.

Parents own their data

The people who know a family's phone numbers, addresses and emergency contacts are the family. ContactPortal makes keeping them correct the parent's job, not the school office's.

One home for contact information

All contact and demographic information for students and their contacts is maintained here, so there's one place to update it and one version of it everywhere else.

Addresses verified by Canada Post

Every address is checked against Canada Post, the most current and accurate source of Canadian addresses, before it can be saved. No more misspelled streets or missing postal codes.

Built for parents on a phone

One question at a time, big yes/no choices and plain language, designed with families who speak English as an additional language in mind. Messages say what to do next.

Bus registration, change and withdrawal

Parents register, pick a stop on a route map, change or withdraw in a few taps, for several children at once. Changes past the routing cutoff go to central office for approval.

Staff see what the parent sees

A central-office user can act as a family to support them, fully audited, and never with more access than the family has.

The problem it solves

In most districts, keeping family information correct falls on school office staff. Every fall they re-key hundreds of contact changes and bus forms from paper and email. Addresses arrive misspelled, a parent’s new phone number reaches one system but not the next, and a bus withdrawal on paper takes weeks to reach the routing and fee systems. Students feel it too: a missed bus is a missed morning of school, and an outdated emergency contact matters most when something goes wrong.

ContactPortal moves that responsibility to the people who actually know the answers. Parents maintain their own family’s data, the office stops being a data-entry desk, and staff only step in for the few changes that need a person’s approval.

Maintained in the hub, synced everywhere

Student and contact information that parents maintain is held in SIF-HUB, and the hub keeps it in step with the systems around it, in both directions.

Your SIS syncs students, families, contacts and schools up to the hub, and receives the parent’s corrections back. Parents sign in with the parent account they already use for your SIS, and staff sign in with Microsoft Entra ID.
Your transportation system sends routes, runs, stops, distances and eligibility, so parents see the bus their child actually rides, and receives bus requests and verified addresses back.
Your fee system sends fee groups and payment options for each bus status, and receives each rider’s fee group back.

Because every change lands in the hub once and is stamped with where it came from, the hub knows a parent corrected their own phone number, and a nightly SIS load won’t quietly overwrite it.

The Bus Page

The Bus Page shows each child’s current busing in one table, so a parent with several children can see at a glance who rides and who doesn’t. From there a parent can:

Register, choosing a bus status and payment option filtered by the child’s grade and school, and a first day of service, with one tap for the full year.
Change, with a bus to a second home or childcare, a different stop, or a new address, closing the current arrangement and starting the new one in the same step.
Withdraw, with a clear confirmation and a last day riding. The child keeps their seat through that day.

Registrations before the routing cutoff are approved automatically. Later registrations and any change go to central office as Requested, Pending, then Approved or Denied, with notes. School-year dates such as the fee-group lock, the routing cutoff and the refund reminder are settings for the office, not code, so they move without a software release.

Proven in production

ContactPortal runs at a Calgary K-12 school authority, where families keep their own contact details current and manage busing for their children, with changes flowing through the hub to the SIS, transportation and fee systems.

Ready to Make More Room for Learning?

With offices in Calgary, AB; Desert Hot Springs, CA; and Brooksville, FL, we serve schools, districts and educational organizations across North America. Let's talk about where you are and where you want to go.