Phil Carolan Director of Technology Lenawee/Monroe Technology Consortium 2015 National Conference, October 12-15, 2015 Palm Springs, CA John Gates Manager of Information Systems Lake Park High School Presented by:

 Phil Carolan – Director of Technology for the Lenawee/Monroe Technology Consortium  (two counties in southeast Michigan)  currently also Director at Large for SNUG  (SunGard National Users’Group) 

 John Gates– Manager of Information Systems  Lake Park High School  currently also Director at Large for SNUG  (SunGard National Users’Group) 

 We represent multiple districts with multiple solutions deployed over the years and here to share our experiences.  We hope you feel free to share your thoughst as well throughout this presentation, so please ask questions or offer additional advice where you note similar experiences ◦ -Thank You

The basics - frontline experience with your staff, students and parents Getting data to 3 rd party Alert notification systems FCC gets involved Communication strategies Discuss enhancement ideas Q & A

The basics - frontline experience with your staff, students and parents Using eSchool tools News Notifications Alerts Calendar HAC eFinance EAC

Anyone care to share some of your use cases?

Notifications - so many options to choose from attendance, IPR, classwork, and report card alerts set up to run every night. Parents have given us great feedback because they can set what alerts they want and the criteria for the alert. They don't have to keep going out to HAC and checking. They get an notifying them of any changes One of our teachers said she uses the Notes feature in TAC anytime she talks to a students parent

… another teacher said he sends s out all the time for parents through home-access- about upcoming events, current grades, activities happening in the class. He uses it because it has almost all of the parents in that class signed up. It is a great tool; I have been using it since I started here I use eSchool 10 times per year per class (round numbers), It allows me to communicate with parents when I hold a seminar class (for parents), before their students have a test, when a project is announced or due, or other upcoming events. This year, the coverage per class seems better, i.e. a larger percentage of the class is covered by a blanket eSchool .

eFinance options – Admin messaging Anyone using this?

Getting data to 3 rd party Alert notification systems Districts could chose to integrate eSchoolPLUS and their 3rd party alert systems in various ways – eSchool Upload/Download Utility - SQL scripting -(SIF)Schools Interoperability Framework -API What did you chose and why?

Need for an anchor record - we require a Priority 1 Guardian Home phone record for EVERY student, we have relabeled ‘Home’ to ‘Primary# (Required)’ to help emphasise this

Primary Additional OutreachEmergency1Emergency2Emergency3Emergency4 Priority 1 Guardian Home (H) phone record Priority 2 Guardian Home (H) phone record Priority 1 Guardian Mobile (M) phone record Priority 2 Guardian Mobile (M) phone record First available Emergency (C) contact Home (H) phone record First available Emergency (C) contact Mobile (M) phone record Primary Additional OutreachEmergency1Emergency2Emergency3Emergency4 Priority 1 Guardian Home (H) phone record Priority 1 Guardian Mobile (M) phone record Priority 2 Guardian Home (H) phone record first available > Priority 2 Other (O) contact Home (H) phone record first available > Priority 3 Other (O) contact Home (H) phone record first available > Priority 4 Other (O) contact Home (H) phone record Primary Additional OutreachEmergency1Emergency2 Priority 1 Guardian Home (H) phone record Priority 2 Guardian Home (H) phone record Priority 1 Guardian Mobile (M) phone record Priority 2 Guardian Mobile (M) phone record We let our district choose which contacts are pulled based on Contact-Type, Priority and Phone-Type

Data is pulled from eFinance as well

Here is an example of using eSchool Activity tracker to assign students to pre-defined communication groups

Applications > Human Resources > Personnel > Reference Tables > Situation Types Here are examples of our use of eFinance Situation Types to assign staff to communication Groups

Here is how this looks on an employee record

Communication strategies Things you likely know: - keep messages to the point - for short messages repeat the content (some older home answering machines need more than a few seconds to engage) - listen to your voice recordings before you send (use text-to-speech sparingly) - remember to mention to check your district’s website for more details (keep the events up-to-date on the district web site) - listen to your voice recordings before you send them Things you may not have considered : - when promoting an event try getting a local celebrity voice for the recording - throw in some good-news messaging every now and then - not every message needs to be a voice message use your systems options and many interface with Twitter/Facebook and don’t forget RSSS (a great way to push messages to digital signs and your web followers)

FCC gets involved Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

Discuss enhancement ideas - Add 2 new fields to the phone contact records: automated messages allowed send me text messages - Add a one time acknowledgement to the HAC sign in indicating I acknowledge that any data entered into contact records will be use for automated electronic communications to me - repurpose the Listed/Unlisted phone flag and allow an acknowledgment of both calls and SMS with a single checkbox -Consider new phone-types: CTC (Consent-to-Call), -CTT (Consent-to-Text) and OF (On-File)