April 2008 — Features

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Meet the Parents

by Matt Villano

"Knowing when an assignment is due, when a special event is taking place, or even understanding a child's difficulty in school brings the parent closer to the child."
Sean Moshir, CellTrust

A New Way to Communicate

Using technology to keep parents abreast of what's happening at school is a departure from the way things used to be done. As near as the 1990s, schools communicated with parents by calling them individually, or by printing up announcements about such things as parent-teacher conferences on "dittos" and handing them out for students to take home. Often, the papers never even made it home; students would lose them or toss them out along the way-or never bother to remove them from their backpacks.

For some schools, the preferred method of communicating with parents was the telephone. Many schools used the "calling tree," a system by which administrators who had a message to deliver called a handful of parents, who in turn were expected to call other parents and pass the message along.

In still other schools, when administrators wanted information distributed, they would have teachers call parents themselves- which could add up to 200 phone calls in a given week.

Stage 1: Define the outcomes.

PROJECT FUNDING IS SORTED OUT AND BROAD ORGANIZATION GOALS ARE SET.

"Bad numbers, blocked numbers, work schedules, and dialing limitations at school made that very difficult," says Alex McKenzie, a biology teacher for the Whittier Union High School District (CA). "Also, for a high school teacher, making regular contact with even a small percentage of a caseload sometimes exceeding 200 students was daunting."

Gradually, as technology became increasingly sophisticated and a greater number of K-12 districts started using content management systems, schools embraced the more efficient computer-based notification systems

. Essentially, these systems are glorified databases with a graphical user interface on the front end. Each student has a file, and educators (or district technologists) populate each file with primary contact information for a student's parents or guardian. Over the course of the year, as the need to communicate with parents arises, teachers log in to the database and select which information to broadcast and which parents will receive it.

The technology is as easy as selecting e-mail recipients from an address book and clicking send. In many cases, the systems tackle in two minutes the tasks that once took schools anywhere from two hours or two days to complete.

Improving Parental Attendance

At the Harlem Success Academy, a public elementary school in New York City, educators use a basic short message service from CellTrust to keep a community of more than 280 parents updated on important events via text-message blasts.