Attach tasks to families/ students.

We would like the ability to not only assign Tasks to employees but also attach them to family/ student files. 
This functionality would primarily improve the efficiency of tracking open client requests like, "John Smith needs a tutor by Wednesday."  "John Smith" would link back to that client's profile where we would see a record of all other requests, open and closed.
Currently we use Tasks in Zoho CRM as a way of keeping track of all of the outstanding requests from clients regardless of lead source (phone, e-mail, web form, in-person,etc.)
Teachworks has a section in the student file to keep track of communications, but it doesn't have a way to mark them as "tasks" or "outstanding requests" and to highlight them as action-required.
I think the simplest implementation would be to take the existing task functionality and also add the ability to link it to a family/ student.  The family/ student profile would then show a history of all tasks both open and closed.
We would like the abi