Frequently Asked Questions

The GreatSchools Parent Community is a safe, supportive community where you can connect with like-minded parents and share your success stories about your child’s education. You can use the community to find answers to your questions about school choice, dealing with bullies and more. And, you can advocate to improve schools in your community.

While all community visitors—registered members and those just passing through—can read advice, questions and answers, and most group discussions, that’s only the tip of the community iceberg. Registered users can publish, post, and meet parent members, which makes for a truly interactive, rewarding community experience.
Have you taken the community tour yet? It may help you understand more about what the community has to offer.

While advice is meant to help you share your knowledge and expertise in an in-depth, uninterrupted way, Q&A engages you in conversation with other community members. Something on your mind? Use Q&A to get quick answers to your tough questions. Keep in mind that one mom's answer might be totally different from another mom's. The great thing about Q&A is that it’s a quick way to find lots of solutions to the parenting problem you're facing.

Because many parenting challenges don’t lend themselves to quick answers, advice is a way to share your knowledge and experiences in more depth. Have you found the secret to pulling your seventh-grader away from his video games to concentrate on his math homework? Or maybe, after a particularly harrowing long weekend, you learned the best way not to schedule college tours with your high school junior. Advice is a way for you to describe and share learning experiences like these with the parent community. And if you’re on the other side, looking for pearls of wisdom from a parent who’s been in your situation, advice is the place to find in-depth anecdotes and tips.

Think of it this way: advice is meant to tap into your inner journalist and storyteller, while Q&A is more like a parents' meeting where everyone’s encouraged to share their solutions to a particular problem.

Groups are designed to connect you with other parents who share your specific interests and concerns. Say you’re raising a third-grader who’s recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Finding support and sharing resources with other parents can help you help your child. Groups are a way for you to come together with other parents who are raising a child with ADD/ADHD and discuss your concerns, vent your frustrations and brainstorm solutions.

Privacy matters to us (and if you don't believe me, GreatSchools Privacy Policy!). Groups can have one of three privacy settings: open, public and private. In open groups, everyone and anyone in the parent community is welcome to post group discussions, reply to group discussions, read discussions and replies, and watch group activity. Public groups require that users join the group and be approved by the group leader before posting in and interacting with the group. But anyone—group members and non-members alike—can read what's been posted. Private groups are just that: private. No one can read discussions in private group, and group membership requires an invitation from the group leader to join.

Badges help identify leaders in the community. They’re given to active members and showcase their unique involvement in the community. We’ve got a badge for group leaders, top members and GreatSchools staff—watch for more!

We’re not trying to take you back to elementary school, we just think that rank is a great way to recognize active members—the parents who are writing helpful advice, posting insightful answers and reaching out to other members in a positive way. It also helps point new community members toward the veterans who can help show them the ropes.
If you think you’ll get to number one by simply posting a lot of annoying one-word comments, I hate to burst your bubble. There’s a pretty complex system around rank that takes into account quality as well as quantity. That includes (but is not limited to) how your posts are rated by parents in the community, how many votes you’ve received, whether other members have read your contributions, and the like.
And it’s not about how many friends you have, either.

“Tags” and “tagging” don't have anything to do with the playground. In the community, tags are a way for you to describe posts with simple keywords. Tags also make it easy to find posts you might be interested in.
Let’s say you just finished writing advice about how to ease test anxiety. How would you sum it up using a couple of individual words? Test. Fear. Relaxation. These are tags. You’ll notice that, after adding these tags to your advice, they show up on your published article page. If you click one of these tags, you’ll see all of the posts that have been written about that topic, making it easy to find other content you might find interesting. The tags you add will help others find your advice because they'll appear in a tag cloud on the community home page and advice page.

I did. Tag clouds are those weird-looking lists of words in which some words are big, some are small. The bigger words are popular tags, which means that a lot of parents have used the tag to describe posts. The smaller words are less popular.
So, if you’re ever curious about what parents are talking and writing about, it’s a good idea to look at the tag cloud—you’ll know what’s hot right away.

Look no further than your dashboard! Your dashboard is your own private community control center. This page brings key community tools to your fingertips, and helps you keep an eye on the community posts you care about. You can access your private messages, friend requests, account details, drafts, recent activity and watchlist directly from your dashboard.

If you’ve found an advice article you like, a question that sums up something on your mind or a group discussion that gets you thinking, you can keep tabs on it by adding it to your watchlist. You’ll be notified when new comments, answers or replies have been added to your watched items.

When you post a new question, advice or group discussion, you can choose to receive an email every time a community member adds an answer, comment or reply to your post. When you add an answer, comment or reply to someone else’s post, you can elect to get an email every time someone else responds to that post. That way, you’re in tune with who’s reading and responding to your ideas, and you don’t have to come back to the community every five minutes to see who’s responding to you.

The emails will let you know that someone’s responded, and give you a direct link to check out that member’s response. The email will also include a link that you can click to unsubscribe from immediate updates, in case you decide you don’t want updates anymore.

When you choose to receive immediate updates on a post, the post is also added to your watchlist. That means you can manage your notification settings right on your watchlist page.

When you report a post, the GreatSchools Community Admin Team will review your report. The admin team is a group of dedicated members that includes both GreatSchools staff and active parents in the community. One of the team's responsibilities is to review, discuss and vote on posts that are reported, making the final decision to keep or delete them. Keep in mind that we don't publicly discuss posts or users that have been reported, so you may not be aware of the admin's decision after you've reported something.

Don’t worry—you can email the Community Moderator if you have a question that hasn’t been answered here.