That’s a common sentiment when you have kids in school 
I’m volunteering on the parent association for a small rural elementary school and last tried a “fix” last year. Here’s how my approach looked:
My setup and considerations were:
- Align with a simple feed layout since most parents access on mobile
- Use categories for access management. There’s a few general public topics and access to further topics is based on group membership like family, student, volunteer
- Use tags for actual categorization. The Comunidad section on the screenshot features tags, while Accesso are the categories that give access to tagged topics based on group membership
I still think this is a solid setup that could work well in theory. However, practice revealed several obstacles:
The space is highly regulated. Schools and teachers can only use platforms that public institutions have contracted. There’s likely already established channels and an app for family communication. It may be a pain, but you can’t escape it. This creates a huge threshold for introducing another platform and expecting parents to install and onboard it.
Technical skill levels can be very limited. It would have taken considerable effort to onboard all parents and curate a new platform like Discourse.
Even with a simple frontend, the admin side needs a volunteer. I couldn’t find any other parent able or interested in learning the details of managing Discourse. This meant I’d be solely responsible, which isn’t sustainable when we eventually leave the school. And with elementary school, there’s already a clear timeline for that.
I actually dropped the idea and feel it was the right choice. We’re changing schools this year, and it would have been a mess trying to wrap up a system no one else could administer. I also think this space is generally unfavorable for individual solutions. You’d likely need to offer and push a platform at the public institutional level to make it work.