Schools Promoting New App For Parents

Overton County Schools have launched a new mobile app that families can use to receive messages and updates from the district.

Technology Supervisor Brent Thrasher said that parents can use the free app to access information about each school in the county as well. Thrasher said it will make keeping up with school events much more convenient.

“Most folks are using their phones as their primary computing device nowadays,” Thrasher said. “And so just with that app, whenever we send out information they’ll get a push notification and so that just helps them to kind of stay informed without having to make that intentional motion of going to our website to find that information. They get it delivered to them.”

Thrasher said the new system also makes communication easier for the district because they can add messages or events to their website and the app at the same time. Thrasher said there is information on the district’s website on how to download the app.

“As well, we can do the alerts,” Thrasher said. “So like when we close school, we can do that from that same dashboard.”

Thrasher said the app went live at the start of the school year but they waited until October to start promoting it.

“We had actually a couple of new platforms,” Thrasher said. “And so I just wanted to make sure that, each of our schools have a digital media liaison, and so I wanted to make sure that they were comfortable with pushing out this new information, getting all that built out.”

Thrasher said the app has allowed them to save a little money by consolidating their two platforms for websites and text or phone communications into one place.