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| Enhance overall communication |
Superintendents and school principals can use SchoolConnects to deliver personal messages in their own voices to parents, and conduct automated telephone surveys with little effort. Teachers can push out information to parents and students in specific grades and classes. Counselors and social workers can use SchoolConnects to maintain frequent communication with parents of students requiring special attention. Librarians can use SchoolConnects to collect overdue library items and fines.
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| Communicate with parents, staff and students |
Not only is SchoolConnects effective for delivering notices and reminders to parents, it is also useful for communicating with students and staff. For example, a time change in band practice can be sent to all band members quickly by phone and email. A reminder by a teacher to bring certain materials to class can be sent to students the evening before. An emergency staff meeting or cancellation can be sent to all affected staff in minutes.
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| Effective and secure |
| Delivering school messages by phone and email has proven to be more effective in reaching parents than printed notices brought home by students. Young children have a tendency to lose notices on the way home. Even when notices do make it home, parents often don't receive them in a timely manner. Some older students may even deliberately avoid giving their parents school notices. In situations where printed notices need to be delivered by students to their parents, a reminder phone call or email to parents helps ensure that parents ask their children for the notices. With more and more parents using cellular phones and email, SchoolConnects provides an increasingly effective and secure way to communicate with all parents. |
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| 2-Way communication channel |
| SchoolConnects' interactive response capability provides a 2-way communication channel that allows the sender to request a response to a message using the telephone keypad or by leaving a voice message. For example, a parent receiving an absence call can be asked to select a reason for the absence by pressing a key on the telephone or by leaving a voice message. Parents' responses can be easily viewed on screen or listened to over the phone. Parents who want to avoid message interception by their children can be issued a PIN(s) that can be used to confirm receipt of messages or ensure only the intended recipient hears the message. |
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| Save time and money |
| SchoolConnects frees up teachers and office staff from routine communication work and allows them to focus their attention on matters that require their personal attention. No more spending hour after hour making repetitive phone calls. No longer will school staff need to print, collate and distribute notices to each class. SchoolConnects saves money on postage. It can also help recover unreturned library items, textbooks, musical instruments and athletic equipment, generating further savings for schools. With SchoolConnects, less class time needs to be spent distributing printed school reminders and notices, leaving more class time for learning. |
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| Reduce tardiness, absenteeism and dropouts |
| Prompt notification to parents has proved to be very effective in reducing tardiness and absenteeism. Schools have reported a substantial decrease on both counts after implementing SchoolConnects. The result is a reduced dropout rate and a lower loss in associated funding over the long term. |
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| Track school efforts to communicate |
| As much as SchoolConnects can help enhance communication with parents and students, some parents will still blame the school for not having made adequate effort to communicate with them. Reports can be easily generated listing the history of all phone calls and messages sent to a specific household to substantiate the effort made by the school to communicate with each parent. |
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| Take the pulse of the community regularly |
| The PowerSurvey module enables schools and districts to conduct response-driven, multi-question telephone surveys easily and efficiently without cost. It enables school and district administrators to gauge the acceptance of new programs and initiatives before implementing them. Collected data can be easily exported for analysis with no costly data-entry work associated with traditional paper-based surveys. |
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| Enhance student safety |
| Calling parents of absent students immediately after morning roll call can greatly enhance student safety, especially younger students. |
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| Reach out to different ethnic communities |
| SchoolConnects can deliver messages to parents in their own preferred language, enabling schools to communicate effectively with parents from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. |
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| Bridge the "Digital Divide" |
| As much as email is fast becoming the preferred mode of communication, there remain many parents who do not have ready access to the Internet on a daily basis. SchoolConnects' capability of delivering telephone and electronic messages allows schools to provide the same service level equitably to all parents on both sides of the "Digital Divide". |
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