In the coming weeks, multiple changes will be coming to Canvas at the St. James R-1 School District. These changes could possibly affect many Canvas Parent accounts. All changes are not anticipated to affect Student or Teacher accounts.

Canvas Login Page

In an effort to add resiliency to the Canvas platform, additional modifications will be made to the Canvas Login Page to allow for students, teachers, administrators, and parents to access Canvas even when there are infrastructure issues at the School.

Student and Teacher accounts will begin using their district-provided Microsoft 365 accounts to login into Canvas. Students and Teachers will be able to use the same credentials they use for most of the district-provided applications.

Parent accounts will become decoupled from the SISK12 Parent Portal as a part of this transition. All passwords will be reset and emailed to the email address on file. New Canvas Parent accounts will receive a notification when their account is created along with their initial login credentials.

Once this update is applied, all future logins to the Canvas platform will be redirected to canvas.stjschools.org. This page acts as a landing page for alerts regarding the Canvas platform as well as provides direction on where any user needs to go to log in or register.

Canvas Theme Update

To better match the district’s branding, Canvas has received a theme update to coincide with the Login Page update. This update is purely cosmetic and does not change any functionality inside of Canvas.

Canvas Parent Accounts

Canvas Parent accounts have been difficult to maintain with how they are currently implemented. Since the initial introduction of Canvas Parent accounts many years ago, much of the Canvas platform directly affecting Canvas Parent accounts has changed. There have been many changes to the Canvas platform that will better optimize how Canvas Parent accounts are created and maintained moving forward. To better utilize many of these advancements on the platform, much of the current process for creating and maintaining Canvas Parent accounts will need to be updated.

This is a big undertaking and will require a considerable amount of time to fully re-work current Canvas Parent Accounts to be fully functional with the updated process. Much of this process requires manually reviewing accounts that cannot be converted manually.

As it stands, parents with an @stjschools.org email address listed in the SIS Parent Portal currently have a merged experience consisting of both their Parent Account and Teacher Account in one account. As a part of this process, these user accounts will be separated and @stjschools.org email accounts will no longer be able to be used as a Canvas Parent account. To restore access, parents will need to have their email updated on the SIS Parent Portal to email not associated with the district.

More Info

See below for a breakdown of all of the upcoming changes. If you have any questions, please contact canvas@stjschools.org. This email is monitored by the district Canvas admins and they should be able to answer any questions you may have.