News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Putnam County Schools launched a new one-stop communication platform for faculty, parents, and students.
Communications and Marketing Supervisor Buddy Pearson said ParentSquare allows for mass communication such as announcing school cancellations, as well as two-way communication so parents can talk with teachers. Pearson said every school will be integrated into the system so parents with children at different schools can monitor everything from one app.
“It really just kind of makes everything so much easier to navigate,” Pearson said. “You know, archiving, analytics, reporting, language translation, smart and urgent alerts, posts and newsletters, social media, website, attendance, automatic notices about lunch balances.”
Pearson said the program will also be useful in the classroom as teachers can use it to manage digital assignments and divide students into groups for activities or projects. He said they will be moving all of the district’s websites into ParentSquare’s Smart Sites service for easier navigation and web management.
“We also have on our website just a couple of tools if parents need some instruction,” Pearson said. “And the thing is, is ParentSquare provides great training. They can be live online training or videos that you can watch for students, for parents, for teachers, for principals, for administrators just to be able to understand how to navigate it a little bit better.”
Pearson said their goal is to get every website integrated into ParentSquare’s system by August 1.
“May not make that deadline, but it shouldn’t be very long after that,” Pearson said. “But yeah, the systems are in place. Everything is ready to go.”
Pearson said that the district and each school will still have their own websites after the transition, they will just operate differently than before.
“One of the benefits about this is if they post something on social media, it can be automatically displayed on their website as well,” Pearson said. “And that just enhances, being able to go to your website, see what’s been posted on social media and vice-versa.”
Pearson said they began searching for a new communication platform after their previous one was bought out and they did not receive the services they were expecting in the transition.
