According to an email sent out to parents by community relations director Paula Foreman on March 25, on March 30, the AASD transitioned to ParentSquare for all communication between school and home. Families received an invitation by email, March 26, from ParentSquare that included a link to activate their account.
“It’s a mass communication platform that will handle everything from our district wide notifications the whole way down to the classroom level,” tech director Justin Arthur said. “Principals can use it to send out building-wide communications, their weekly newsletter, those types of things. Teachers, coaches, club advisers, will be able to use it a sport, club, individual class level, like the Remind App,or BAND that gets used.”
According to the ParentSquare website , “ParentSquare is passionate about better connecting schools with families to improve student outcomes and school success. To that end, we are constantly innovating and thinking about how we can apply innovation in other areas to school-home interaction, and bring about new ways to communicate and build relationships.”
Multiple district level messages have been sent using the new service regarding attendance procedure changes, sports schedule changes and Act 44 notifications.In order to receive messages the district must have correct contact information.
“That’s one of the biggest challenges of the community,” Foreman said. “Because ParentSquare is also being used as our emergency notification system, that piece is really important. Parents update their information in Skyward as email addresses changes or cell phones change. Without correct information we’re not able to deliver the messages that we need to get to our parents.”
The district is making the switch so that all communications are kept on the same platform, and not all over the place with different apps and other communications.
“It’ll probably take about six months to get everyone in, get all the sports and clubs moved over,” Arthur said. “Right now, we have our administrative staff on it, and we have our building principals. Teachers have the next two months, just to test it out, then we’ve started to implement some different sports and everything. But the requirement to use for the teachers will not start until the winter sports season.”
ParentSquare is only for parents; parents can send teachers messages from the app. The district is adding StudentSquare into the mix at a later time.
“At the secondary level, there’s also StudentSquare that will be implemented,” Arthur said. “Students will be able to put an app on their phone and receive the emails or sign in on their Chromebooks. Secondary students benefit from all the classes, and then sports and clubs and activities.”
According to ParentSquare’s website, safeguarding the confidentiality of all the information collected is a priority as well as being the industry leader with security protocols for data transfer and storage.
“We are collecting feedback. There’s a lot of analytics behind the scenes that we’re able to look at so we’ll be able to assess,” Arthur said. “I think we’ll get a lot of feedback from faculty, staff, parents and students.”
Chemistry teacher Patrick Kirby feels ParentSquare will be a useful platform for communication for teachers and parents.
“It is a very cool thing,” Kirby said. “I have not gotten anything from any parents yet, nor do I think they even know about it. I’m really not expecting anything from parents because I don’t really get anything from parents anyway.”
