Sending Parental Notification if a Student is Absent from Class

Boyd Reilly

I have a request from a parent who is divorced and not the primary caretaker of a student. He is requesting a notification be sent anytime his child misses a class. I know how to set this up school wide in the Conduct module but I do not want all the parents to be getting notifications. Just this one parent or have a way for parents to decide to opt into receiving this notification much like they go into there setting and chose among the options they have now.

Tech Help does not know of a way and suggested I reach out to the community. API solutions can be used if you know of one. Any idea at all would be welcomed.

Thanks.

Boyd

Brian Gray

@Boyd Reilly - The SKY API does not reveal much (if any) attendance information.

You can create an Advanced List that reports the relevant information and then use the API "List Single" endpoint to read the list content into a program and process it.

I have several attendance-related lists. They all start like this:

Rose Mary Herbert

I have seen something about BrightArrow being able to send attendance notifications, but not sure if it can be selected for just one parent or if the notification would go to all parents with an absent student. We use the software currently but only for emergency notifications and really like how it works for that.

Kimberly Fradelis

You could also invite him to log into Bb and view the student's attendance record whenever he wishes to view it. As long as the school is getting the information it needs to excuse or unexcuse an absence, it may not be reasonable to keep a noncustodial parent updated as to when the student is on campus. I would be inclined to let higher-up administrators know this is happening.


Visit-U may have the feature where you can set up automated phone calls/alerts when there are absences. There is a Bb integration available. For a moment, we were considering this software for emergency alerts.

Jess Moxsky

I'm going to second Kimberly's suggestion of looping in administrators. I typically try to encourage parents to log into the K12 system to seek out the information they need rather than get into the habit of spoon-feeding specific information. Custody is a tricky thing and I'm typically reticent to make one-off changes in the database for singular requests like this.