District needs to open registration but many students are unlinked to parents

Affected individuals

* Exisitng account holders -- usually parents of incoming students who have an older sibling

Cause

When ActivityHero pre-creates accounts for parents to register students based on information from the SIS, it relies on exact match of first name, last name, phone, and email.

Occasionally (fewer than 10%), there will be mismatches between the existing account and information in SIS. For example, parent changes email address. Previous account has the old email address and same phone number. SIS may have new email and same phone number. During data import, child is not linked, because there is no exact match.

Another common cause is a parent will have 2 last names in SIS but use 1 last name on exisitng account. Or use 2 last names in ActivityHero but have one of the last names appear as a middle name in Aeries.

Workaround

If district is open to parents adding the new participant themselves, you can escalate to change a setting to remove the "allow_only_sis_participants" setting, as well as the "disable grades at checkout" setting. 

Until Sep 3, 2026 -- one of the tradeoffs is that districts will also not be able to restrict their activities to students of this location. If the widgets are by location, then the risk is small that someone will sign up for an activity at the wrong location. 

After Sep 3, districts will be able to keep the location restriction even if they do not have "allow only sis participants" setting on.

Once "Add New Participant" is enabled, Parents should continue to select their pre-added students if possible. They should only use "Add New Participant" if they do not see their child.

Adding a New Participant will require the exact name and DOB as entered in the SIS.

A verification code will be sent to the contact information on file. User will choose if they prefer phone or email.

Once the verification code is correctly added, the new student is added to the account and the parent can proceed.

Incorrectly added student information will return an error. This is intentional as we want to make sure real students are added.