Newsletters
When enabled by your school, newsletters bring general school news into Messages, with an optional email copy.
Staff open Families → Newsletters, choose a starting template, select the audience and write the sections.
Preview the edition and recipient counts, review that the news is suitable for email, then choose Send now or Schedule for later.
Parents open Messages → Newsletters and choose Reply in Messages. Check the listed office or room team before replying.
How newsletters work
School news emails start off. Parents can turn them on in Account and choose private-message email alerts separately. Newsletters and explicit general announcements can include their full content in email. Ordinary private and group conversations use generic email alerts. All replies stay in Ashby.
Published editions are fixed. Staff can duplicate an edition into a new draft or withdraw it from Ashby; delivered email cannot be recalled. The audience is checked when an edition publishes. Later enrollment does not reveal older newsletters. Private team conversations contain one guardian and the authorized school staff.
What this is
Messages keeps private family conversations, staff discussions, and school announcements in one place. Groups can include staff, families, or both when you choose the audience.
Do this
After you sign in, open Messages from the left menu.
Choose Private conversations or Groups. Select the people or room audience, name the group, and choose who can post.
Write your message. Review any photo attachment and send only when it is ready.
Use Replies for a separate discussion. Open Members to manage the group, mute it, or archive it.
How it works
- Private conversations
- stay between the selected family and authorized school staff. Existing child conversations include only the guardians allowed to participate.
- New messages
- a message that arrives while you’re at the bottom of a conversation comes into view. If you’re reading further up, you stay where you are and New message ↓ shows above the message box; choose it to go to the new message.
- Audience groups
- can follow a room, location, or school audience as enrollment and staff assignments change. New members see messages from when they join; leaving and rejoining does not restore older history.
- Announcements
- can be staff-only. A family reply opens a private conversation rather than changing the announcement.
- Photos
- keep their separate consent and child-access checks. Being in a group does not grant access to unrelated photos or child records.
- Writing help
- is optional and creates an editable draft from supported topics and school-approved facts. Review it before sending. Nothing is sent automatically.
- Parents who haven’t joined
- can’t get messages yet. Staff who see the parents get Send invite (or Resend invite) and copy the link to text it. An assistant, whose job doesn’t show parents, reads that no parent of the child can get messages yet and that the director can invite them.
- Keeping messages
- depends on school retention rules and recorded holds. Archiving a group stops new posts but keeps its history until it is eligible for removal.