Family Access » School Messenger

School Messenger

School Messenger Parent Notification System
 
What is a parent notification system?
 
Stephenville ISD has recently contracted with the School Messenger parent notification system. The power of such a system is its ability to share information quickly with students’ families, including school closings for inclement weather, power outages, emergency safety measures, transportation changes, and more. This allows district and building administrators to contact all affected families within moments.
 
You need not sign up for this service — your inclusion is automatic. School Messenger pulls contact information from the District’s student database system when a call is made. Rest assured that your personal information and contact numbers will be strictly secure, and you will not receive any non-school messages as a result of this service.
 
Parents may elect to receive messages through email notice, text message, and/or telephone call. Log into Family Access to update your contact information.
 
What you and your family need to know:
 
Caller ID
Caller ID will display the district or school phone number, depending on which administrator initiated the call.
 
Live answers
When you answer your phone, the system will detect your “hello,” and the message will begin shortly.
 
Answering machines
The system will detect that your machine has answered and will play the message to your machine. The maximum number of rings before hang up is 4. Please make sure your machine answers after 4 rings or you may miss the message.
 
Message repeat
At the end of the message you will be prompted to “press one” to hear the message again. This is helpful when a child answers the phone and hands it to you, allowing you to then repeat the message in its entirety.
 
Attendance
Schools also use School Messenger to report daily attendance issues to parents. You will be notified by this system daily if your child is recorded as absent for one or more class periods in the day. Calls are made daily in the early evening.

General and Emergency Calls
Any calls related to weather-related school closings, power outages, emergency safety measures, transportation changes or other issues requiring immediate notification will be sent as “emergency” calls. All other calls will be sent as “general.”
If a call is sent out as “emergency” the system will call all numbers in the District’s student database system for that students’ family. For staff members, it will call both the main number and any alternate number (if available) from Skyward.
The system will not call duplicate numbers. If the student’s home phone, father home phone and mother home phone are all the same, the system will make one call to that number.
The system will leave messages in all the media selected by the parent in Family Access.
 
Family Access
Parents may log into the Skylert system to update family contact information with current email and/or cell numbers. The district requests that parents keep this information current so that any/all system calls may be delivered in a timely manner. A tutorial is available from the Family Access portal or by clicking on the tutorial link to the right.
 
Note that only the primary account holder has the ability to modify content in the Family Access database.
 
If you have questions regarding the Family Access features or wish to register for an account, please contact your student’s campus student accounting representative or use the hot link located on the District’s home page.