April 2008 — Features
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Meet the Parents
In just one year, using a system that alerts parents when their kids miss school, Newport Independent Schools increased its daily attendance rate by 1.5 percentage points, generating $80,000 in state funding.
School CEO Eva Moskowitz says school officials send out an average of four to six texts a month, informing parents about everything from next week's Open House to upcoming tests for which their children need to study. Moskowitz says that while there's no way to prove parents are reading the notes, the approach seems to be working, since the school logged nearly 100 percent parental attendance at school events last year.
"We can't, as a school, educate children alone," she says. "By using this technology to fill parents in, we're working with them as a team to get things done right." Administrators at the Valley Crossing Community School (VCCS) in Woodbury, MN, have embraced similar technology to a different end. There, officials have signed up for the Instant Alert service from Honeywell to notify parents whenever weather forces school closings during the year.
Because of how the local residential boundaries are drawn, Valley Crossing pulls from three different districts, so administrators needed something that gave them the flexibility to create distribution lists that accounted for the school's unusual characteristics. Pam Sullivan, VCCS' administrative assistant, says that with the notification service, she has created lists based on district boundaries, neighborhoods, and class enrollment lists to inform parents of any eventuality.
As an example of the system in action, Sullivan recounts a recent snowstorm that prompted one of the three districts to call an early release at 9:30 a.m; the second decided to call a release at 11:30 a.m; the third kept schools open all day. Sullivan says she was able to use the system to send the appropriate message to each student's family in a matter of minutes.
"This is important because it is a safety issue," Sullivan says. "We need to be able to make sure parents receive important communication about late buses, as we don't want to have students standing outside in cold weather if the bus is not going to arrive for another two hours."
Multilingual Messaging
Some notification systems even have the functionality to overcome language barriers. At Sycamore Junior High School in Anaheim, CA, where 53 percent of the more than 1,800 students come from families who speak English as a second language, administrators use TeleParent to phone parents with standard audio announcements about meetings, tests, and homework in three other languages: Spanish, Vietnamese, and Hmong.
Vanessa Massey, a former Title 1 program specialist at the school, says the database interface lets teachers select a different language for each call-in many cases, eliminating the need for a translator of any kind. She adds that an overwhelming number of parents are happy with the system, as evidenced by an outpouring of praise for it at a recent Parents' Night.
