by Mac DeKoch (Posted on October 16, 2026 @ 2:56 p.m.)

Alamo Heights students and parents are adjusting to three new digital platforms this year after the district consolidated multiple communication systems into Skyward, ParentSquare, and Raptor Alert—a change that has simplified communication for some while frustrating others with login problems and message overload. Skyward covers grading for students, while ParentSquare and Raptor Alert provide updates on school-related topics to teachers and parents of students.

Why the Change?

The Alamo Heights school district decided to change platforms to help get everybody on one sole platform for updates, simplifying things.

Brian Grenier, the district’s IT manager, stated, “We had heard over the years from parents that they had too many channels of communication coming at them. So we wanted to consolidate our communication between home and school and home and parents into one place.”

This has allowed for parents and teachers to have one single source of communication. However, some students have disliked the change.

Liam Phieffer, a student at Alamo Heights Junior School, stated, “I miss HAC. I feel it was more efficient than Skyward.” While a majority seems to be on board with the change, some people are not.

The Superiority

These new platforms also demonstrate superiority by working faster and being more simple and less clunky.

Dr. Guthrie, the school principal, stated how school software is always getting better, but the district’s software doesn’t automatically improve itself, and you realize it’s lacking.

He also stated how “periodically, schools would go shopping for a new system, which led us to realize how Skyward would be the best choice for the district.”

Some things that Skyward can do that the previous platform couldn’t were calculate things such as GPAs and report when assignments or work were late or not turned in, helping students understand why grades dropped and stay organized without manually checking every assignment.

Recent Problems

While these platforms have many benefits, they have also brought some problems.

Dr. Guthrie stated how he has heard of many students with login problems, and when they were implementing these new platforms, they had a lot of things to catch. He stated that login information for teachers and students was one of the major ones.

Since many students have stated they have had problems with logging in, the school provided a demonstration a few weeks ago to help students log into Skyward. This helped a lot of students become able to log in to Skyward, helping to end the login problem.

Effects on Students and Parents

The new platforms have affected students in many different ways. Many students and parents are now using them daily to check grades and updates, such as Kline Sharp, who has stated how he “enjoys using Skyward, and I like how simple and easy it is to use.”

However, not all people share Kline’s viewpoint.

Grant Boyher, a student at Alamo Heights Junior School, stated, “I miss HAC. I loved how you could easily access it with Gradeway. It just seemed so much better.” (Gradeway was the school’s previous access center for grading.)

Parents have also reported challenges. Annie DeKoch, a parent of a student at Alamo Heights, has stated, “Too many messages are being sent, and it’s overwhelming to get all these alerts on a regular basis, and you tend to just ignore them.”

New Features

These new platforms have many new features that make these new platforms more accessible. According to Brian Grenier, ParentSquare has a translation feature that can translate texts to a recipient’s preferred language.

He also stated, “In ParentSquare, there’s like some built-in AI where if a teacher’s doing a post, they can run it through the AI piece of that and say, hey, I need this language at a lower reading level. So they could do something like that.”

These features allow teachers and staff to hurdle the language barrier when creating new posts for families speaking specific languages.

Overall Acceptance

Even though teachers may have been confused about these new platforms at first, they are now used by a vast majority of teachers and staff at Heights.

Brian Grenier stated, “We’ll get satisfaction from feedback that we gather from parents and teachers later. But I can measure how many of our teachers are using it. I was looking at this last night, as a matter of fact. Since the start of this year, 84% of all of our teachers in the district have at least sent one message out through ParentSquare. So it’s a pretty high adoption rate, I think.”

There may not be a clear way to measure the satisfaction with these new platforms, but it is clear they are now very widely used and have finally been accepted by a majority of teachers and staff in the Alamo Heights School District.