Beginning the week of April 10, we will be transitioning to a new mass communications system called Apptegy/Thrillshare (the company is Apptegy, the product/platform is called Thrillshare).
On Monday or Tuesday, we will send a welcome message to all families. They will receive the message by text-to-speech phone call, SMS text message, and email to the phone numbers/email addresses listed in Aspen as contacts with a “Priority” of 1 or 2.
Later in the week, we will switch over our automated attendance calls as well, notifying the same contacts if a student is absent that day (and at WHS, also for tardiness and self-dismissal). This will also notify the contacts by phone, text, and email. (WHS self-dismissal notices are email-only.)
This is a change from past practice – we used to only notify contacts with Priority 1, but we are now also sending attendance calls to Priority 2 contacts, to cover cases of joint custody and other uncommon situations. This means that you might get phone calls from people who need to update their contact information. You can make the changes in Aspen, which gets synced with Thrillshare nightly.
For clarity, this is the way we regard contact “priority” in Aspen:
- Priority 1 and 2 are for legal guardians who should be notified of absences, snow days, and other school alerts and communications.
- Priority 3, 4, 5 and 6 are for emergency contacts. These contacts will never get mass communications, but are in the system in case of an emergency for individual students.
Someone should only be a Priority 1 or 2 contact if they should receive notifications/communications from the school. Any parent or other person who should not be contacted should be marked in Aspen as Priority 3, 4, 5 or 6.