Open House at SGES and a New School-Parent Communication Tool
October 21, 2008
An Open House for the new St. George Elementary School will take place on Tuesday, November 18th from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Student guides will be located throughout the building to provide information to patrons. Refreshments will be provided. Please join in on the fun!
The school district has adopted a new parent-communication tool. We will now have the ability to email, text message, or telephone parents in order to inform them of announcements, schedule changes, student absences, school cancellations, or emergency messages. This web-based system downloads contact information directly from our student management system (Power School), which allows us to choose which parents or groups of parents to contact.
Parents will likely receive emails for routine information and news (articles, newsletters, etc…) and recorded phone messages for things like school closings, student absence notices, and important announcements. For phone messages, the system will make only one call per family and will provide a report to us regarding which families received the message. At least for now, we will continue to contact local media in the event of school closings. For emergency announcements, the system allows us to send information and instructions to parents via text message.
The system is relatively inexpensive (two and one-half dollars per
student per year) and will allow us to keep parents better and more
quickly informed. We will need to perform a trial phone call
to parents so that we know what contact information needs
updating. It’s important that parents provide the schools
with accurate, updated contact information so that we can take full
advantage of this terrific communication tool. We’ll let you
know when that trial phone call will occur.
In other school district news, work is continuing on a feasibility study for a baseball/softball complex at RCJSHS. We hope to present options and cost estimates to the BOE sometime this spring. There was a tremendous response with offers of volunteer help after we sent out an email last week. Our biggest expenses would be engineering/planning, precision dirt work, lighting, and constructing structures (dugouts, press boxes, storage, restrooms, and concessions).
Thanks to our tremendous community spirit and pride, we know we’ll have volunteer labor. In order to realize substantial savings, however, offers of donated materials or skilled labor for those more expensive items would make our plans more financially feasible. Please let me know if you have any information in that regard. My email is stuffled@rockcreekschools.org and our office phone number is 457-3732.
Since we’re all part of one school-community, we want our facilities to be available to families from the entire school district. Hopefully, with enough help, we can make this goal a reality.
