This paper describes an unexpected collateral finding from an educational intervention with at-risk primary school pupils in which parents worked regularly with their children's teacher to leverage his adaptive teaching methods for their children. Efficient parent-teacher communication and effective collaboration are prerequisites, but not given; establishing them unsurprisingly required flexibility on the part of the teacher, flexibility which, perhaps unexpectedly, turned out to be sufficient. A year-long participatory action research was conducted with parents of six at-risk fifth grade primary school students in the Republic of Cyprus. The children come from a small underprivileged urban school; they were identified to be at-risk through the national Ministry of Education assessment. Initially, parents resisted the use of the special-purpose custom-designed online platform for collaboration with the teacher as part of the educational intervention. To overcome this, at the second phase of the study, we switched to the online tools already in personal use by the parents. Parents responded fully, working closely with the teacher, with positive findings for students' performance and changes to teacher-student, teacher-parent and parent-child relationships.