Adam,
In my experience, you can never grant Role Permissions to view a Parent by virtue of having permissions to view the children. Ie by using a summary field and then Tying the Role Permission for the parent to that summary field. Quick Base calculates Permissions from the parents down to the children, so conceptually (based on my experience) if it can�t see a parent, then it can�t see the relationship down to the children so it can�t see the summary fields in that relationship.
The work a round might be to have to allow access to all Students, but then to use form rules to hide huge sections of the form, if the user should not be seeing that student because that student is not in the usual school. Then you need to also ensure that users cannot modify reports at all so they can make their our personal dump of all students at all schools.
