Skyward Family Access Support

What is Skyward?

Lake Washington School District uses a student information system (SIS) called Skyward to manage student data. Skyward is a two-way stream of information: It allows teachers and school staff to provide parents access to their child’s attendance, grades, schedules and more, and it allows parents and caretakers to provide schools with updated contact details, health alerts and other vital information about their child. LWSD provides students and their families with Skyward accounts, so they can access this information at any time. This guide is an overview of the features of Skyward Family Access.

Skyward Family Access overview

Logging in

Your dashboard

Attendance

To view your child’s attendance record, click the Attendance tile. Your child’s current excused (X), unexcused (U), and Tardy (T) totals appear in the current year totals section at the top of the screen.

Click the comment icon to see comments associated with an absence.

Click the blue arrow icon to open details for a listed absence and see more information.

More information about absence:

To inform your child’s school of an absence, click the Absence Requests tab.

Next, click Add Absence Request.

Complete the fields:

Add start date.
Add end date.
Check the All Day box or enter times for a partial day.
Type a reason for the absence in the comment box.
If you have other children, you can copy the absence by selecting them below.
Click Save.

Grades

To access your child’s grades, click the Grading tile. The grades screen shows grades your child has earned in each of their classes for each quarter of the school year (term 1, term 2, term 3, and term 4) as well as overall grades for semesters 1 and 2. You can also see the number of assignments missing, if any.

Click a grade to open the progress report panel at the right of your screen. This panel shows a breakdown of assignments by category.

Grades for the third quarter are labelled T3 in Skyward. Grades for the fourth quarter are labelled T4 in Skyward. Your child’s second semester grade is labelled S2 in Skyward and is based on assignments that fall within the full semester. For high school students, the second semester grade is the one that appears on their transcript.

Graduation plan

High school students can see progress towards graduation by selecting the Graduation Plan tile from their Student Access dashboards.

The Graduation Plan screen displays credits required, completed, in-progress (currently scheduled), waived and remaining.

There are ten credit areas for high school students: English, Social Studies, Math, Science, Health, Physical Education, Fine Arts, Career and Technical Education, World Language and General (Electives). Some of these areas include specific course requirements.

More details on the courses that have met an area can be found by clicking on the round blue arrow icon beside each subject area.

Notifications

You can set up Skyward to automatically notify you of your child’s attendance, grades and more.

From your Skyward dashboard, (1) click the dropdown next to the home button and (2) click Family Access.

Then click My Messages at the top of your screen.

Next, click Settings at the top of your message inbox.

This is the Guardian Notification Settings menu. To ensure you receive messages about your child’s grades, click the cog icon in the Gradebook section of this menu.

Skyward Family Access Guardian Notification Settings

Here you can set up how you’d like to be notified. You can choose whether messages are recurring or sent only once, and you can choose to be notified of missing assignments or grades below a certain threshold.

Low Assignment Score Threshold is the score at which you want to receive an automatic notification when an assignment grade is at that grade or lower.

Low Current Grade Threshold is the score at which you want to receive an automatic notification when your child’s overall class grade is at that grade or lower.

If you wish to stop receiving messages, uncheck the box for “Send….Messages”.

After you’ve made changes to these settings, be sure to click Save.

Online forms

You may see one or more special tiles on your dashboard. Click these tiles to make sure your child’s school has the most up-to-date contact information for your family. Keeping your address and phone numbers up to date allows your child’s school to contact you or other designated caretaker in the case of an emergency. The nurse alert form allows you to notify the school of any health condition that could affect your child at school.

Report Cards & transcripts

Students' report cards and unofficial transcripts are available in Skyward Family Access under Portfolio. Click the Portfolio tile to enter this section. Then click the eye icon beside a file you wish to view or click the arrow icon to download it.

Unofficial transcripts are updated three times a year (after semester one, after semester two, and at the end of September).