For some area school districts, social media such as Twitter and custom-built smartphone applications are joining now fairly-common communications tools such as the Internet, email and text messages as a way to keep parents in the loop.
"I think parents and the communities are looking more and more to online media as a tool for communication from different entities, and especially in education," said Charles Musgrove, community relations coordinator for Brownwood Independent School District.
Musgrove's district recently started "implementing quite a bit of communications through Twitter," he said.
"We tweet out almost daily headlines and different communications from within the district," he said.
Each campus has its own website, and the BISD can send out mass messages about topics such as school closures or weather alerts to anyone registered as a user.
Such communication can be through email, or "if people have registered their phone, they can also get mobile alerts," Musgrove said.
The district also recently published a smartphone application in Apple's App Store, Musgrove said, which can similarly be utilized as a tool for "urgent message alerts, as well as a regular source for news."
"It kind of goes hand-in-hand with our website," he said.
Musgrove said he has received positive input from parents and others.
"We want to make sure everyone knows things that need to be known as soon as possible," he said. "And parents love to hear news of their students — how they're doing in football, the results of different contests. (We are) trying to make sure things don't get lost."
And he said the BISD plans to continue expanding options.
"We're working on both an iPad version of the app and also an Android version," Musgrove said. "We're hoping to get that out this year at some point."
A variety of electronic communication options are similarly important to the Dublin Independent School District, said Superintendent Rodney Schneider.
Many classes have their own Facebook pages to facilitate communication with parents, while coaches and on occasion principals use Twitter to keep parents informed, he said.
"We are a fully integrated district," Schneider said "We have a one-to-one initiative, where our kids grades three through 12 either have an electronic device — either a handheld or a laptop or something similar. And we use lot of social media to communicate in a lot of different areas, from our gradebooks to our athletic programs to our extracurriculars."
The district tries to use a diverse methods to make sure that parents who don't have access to smartphones or the Internet get the information they need, Schneider said
But he said that the ability to access instant media is becoming "second nature to everyone," prompting the DISD to discuss developing its own Web applications, much as Brownwood has.
"We just feel it's beneficial for us to embrace this," Schneider said. "That's how most parents are keeping track of their kids now."
Cynde Wadley, assistant superintendent for curriculum and technology integration with the Wylie Independent School District, said the district recently launched a redesigned website to make it easier to navigate.
"For the first time, class lists were posted to the website for pre-k to fifth grade," Wadley said. "This was done to accommodate our parents that work. In the past, parents could come to the campus beginning at 2 p.m. on the Thursday before school started to find their child's class assignment."
Wylie High School has a Facebook page that it uses to post information for students and parents.
But the biggest news for the district is the launch of its smartphone app Nov. 9.
Created through a partnership with School Connect, an Oklahoma-based, mobile application developer, the application will be available for download in both the Apple and Android app stores.
The application will be financially supported by school-friendly sponsors and will feature push messaging from both the district and school site levels, GPS mapping and navigation, Google calendars to which parents can subscribe, online gradebook access, tap screens for email and phone numbers for district staff and board of education members.
The app will also have lunch menus and athletic information, among other features. Multiple language options will be offered, including Spanish.
The Abilene Independent School District has a product called School Messenger, which allows district staff or campus principals to "send messages to parents who have given us their phone number and their email address," said Mark Gabehart, chief technology officer.
"At the district level, we use that for emergency purposes," he said. "But at the campus (level), they are using that to send out messages to their parents based on their own, individual campus needs."
The same system notifies parents of "attendance callouts," Gabehart said, while a separate offering, called Frontrunner, lets parents look up grades, assignments and attendance.
"That is a mechanism that parents use to find out how their kids are doing in school," he said, a tool that has become popular, especially among middle school and high school parents.
As useful as mass messaging can be, tools such as School Messenger bring certain challenges to the table, Gabehart said.
"Parents' phone numbers change, their email addresses change, and it's a challenge for us to keep all of that information updated in our system," he said.
At the start of school, the district sends out forms for parents to sign that update their contact information, Gabehart said.
Districts must regularly send out useful information while avoiding inundating parents with items they really don't need, Gabehart said.
"You don't want to overdo it," he said. "So you have to find a balance."
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