Indiana schools choose parent notification system

To build support for school-to-home communication, 16 public school districts in Indiana have joined others in the state in choosing the SchoolReach parent notification system to provide schools with emergency alert and parental notification messaging.

SchoolReach has entered a partnership with the Wilson Education Center, one of Indiana’s nine education service centers. The partnership will give a discount on SchoolReach to the center’s member schools.

The parent notification system delivers personalized phone or text messages to parents, staff or other groups via home, office or cell phones. The program allows a school administrator to record a short message to be delivered to an extensive or selective list of parents, teachers or students. It works particularly well in emergency situations, since the system can call parents at a preferred number or multiple phone numbers.

So far, schools have used the system for a variety of purposes, ranging from school activities and open houses to attendance notifications and delayed openings. SchoolReach is web-based, so it requires no additional hardware or phone lines. Administrators can also make multi-language recordings and launch phone-delivered parent polls and surveys, making it a program that schools can use to stay on top of event communications as well as increasing parent involvement.