Parent Portal is a free, complementary feature of Bark for Schools that allows administrators to share certain Bark alerts with parents and guardians. It helps ensure important alerts are seen and acted on even when school staff may not be available — such as evenings, weekends, and school breaks.
How does it work?
Once launched, parents and guardians are invited to create a Parent Portal account. Parents who create their account then automatically receive alerts for their child. If they don’t complete setup immediately, reminder emails are sent weekly unless they unsubscribe from the invitation.
Alerts delivered to parents are based on the severity settings and timing windows chosen by your school.
Parents access their alerts through:
- The Bark website at bark.us
- The Bark mobile app on iOS or Android
What severity and timing settings are available?
Customize the severity and timing of alerts that parents receive.
- Log in as a Super Admin.
- On the top right menu, select Parent Portal > Settings.
-
Configure Severity
Choose whether parents receive Severe only or All alerts. Note that Parent Portal still uses your existing school sensitivity settings. Alerts filtered out at the school level will not be shared with parents. -
Configure Timing
Choose After hours or Anytime. - Changes to severity and timing settings apply moving forward and do not affect previously sent alerts.
💡 Pro Tip: Many schools start with Severe only + After hours during the school calendar year, and adjust as needed during summer/winter breaks.
When parents receive an alert:
- They see the reason the activity was flagged (e.g., bullying, self-harm, sexual content).
- A snippet of the flagged content and where it came from (e.g., Gmail, Drive).
To protect student privacy, any personally identifiable information (PII) for other students is removed unless it was already included in the flagged message itself, as in “Jessica said…”
Yes, if they've enabled text notifications in their account settings.
Yes, Reviewers can manually share an alert with a student’s parent from the alert screen, as long as the parent has an active Parent Portal account.
Yes, you can invite each legal guardian to their own Parent Portal account.
To remove access from a parent/guardian, please contact us at schools@bark.us for further assistance.
No, Bark will not spam or sell parents’ information. Parent Portal alerts are specific to Bark for Schools monitoring and only come when selected thresholds are met.
There is an optional upgrade path to Bark Premium that they'll see in some parts of their Parent Portal dashboard to expand monitoring to include their child's personal text messages and social media usage.
Yes. Parents and guardians who already have a Bark account can use that same account to access Parent Portal, as long as they are invited by the school using the same email address. Once invited, Parent Portal alerts will appear alongside their existing Bark account information.
Parent Portal access does not require parents to upgrade or change their existing Bark account.
Super Admins can view activation stats in Parent Portal Settings. You can see:
- How many parents have been invited
- How many have completed setup