The Free Press, Mankato, MN

Local News

October 14, 2009

Schools try to get the word out

Mankato district works on mass message system

By Tanner Kent

MANKATO — The Mankato Area Public Schools District is working on a new mass notification system.

Called ShoutPoint, th system will send instantaneous messages to parents through their home phones, work phones, cell phones or e-mail accounts. The system is built into the district’s online student-information system — Infinite Campus — and should be ready for test runs in the next several weeks.

“It’s an unbelievable system,” said Cassandra Reasor, a district technology specialist and the resident expert on Infinite Campus. “So fast.”

Parents can get signed up for the notification service through their Parent Portal accounts. (Portal is the parental access portion of Infinite Campus that allows parents to view their students’ grades, attendance and homework assignments).

Once signed up, parents can set their personal preferences for where they want to receive messages.

For instance, parents can choose to have general notices sent to home phones or e-mails, but have high-priority messages sent to cell phones.

Shelly Schulz, the public information director for the city of Mankato and its public schools, said the timing and content of the messages will be determined by individual building leaders.

The new system, she said, complements another messaging service that Mankato residents can sign up for on the city’s online homepage to receive notifications through text or e-mail. The two notification systems are designed for different audiences and are all part of an effort to get information to the right people.

“(ShoutPoint) is an electronic tool to communicate with a school’s internal audience,” Schulz said. “It’s really a fast way to get messages out.”

So fast, in fact, that Reasor said the system can dispense more than 10,000 messages in fewer than 15 minutes — and because of built-in design features, it works cooperatively with local phone companies to not overload the system.

“It’s fantastic,” Reasor said of the Infinite Campus software. “We still haven’t quite tapped its potential.”

The district paid nearly $150,000 for Infinite Campus in 2007 using money from its 2005 technology referendum.

The software is used for a variety of purposes: tracking attendance, recording grades, designing lesson plans and documenting test data. Parents can use the system to monitor their child’s grades and school work.

Any parents not yet signed up can request an identification number at the school their child is attending. For security purposes, a picture ID must be shown before the identification number is mailed out.

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