Fighting Truancy Goes High-Tech In Fort Worth

[TexasStooge]

New System Notifies Parents With Calls, E-mail, Text Messages

FORT WORTH, Texas (KXAS NBC 5) -- The Fort Worth Independent School District is beginning to utilize a new, high-tech alert system to notify parents and police whenever students play hooky.

According to an NBC 5 report, research indicates that many students who skip school drop out of school, abuse drugs and alcohol, and commit crimes.

To minimize that impact, the district is instituting a computerized alert manager system.

"The alert manager notifies parents when their students are absent from class," said Kelly Short, of Neoris Inc. "Our system automatically issues an alert and sends that message to the parent."

The parent must enter a predetermined personal identification number to retrieve the actual message: "A notice of truancy has been issued for [student's name] from the superintendent's office."

Short introduced the system to the district and said it is a much-needed improvement.

"The problem with the [district's] existing system is that if it called the house of a student, typically the student was at home and then they could delete the message from the answering machine," Short said.

However, the alert manager cannot only make phone calls, it can send e-mails and text messages directly to parents' cell phone and e-mail addresses.

For parents like Paul Richmond, the upgrade is welcomed news.

"We assume they get to school, but should for some reason they not get there, a car accident or something worse, we would be notified right away and then we could find out what happened," he said.

The alert manager will be phased into all 140 schools within Fort Worth ISD during the next two years.

It costs $200,000 and is being paid for with the district's administrative fund.

[stormie_skies]

I can see SO many potential problems with this system....

When I was in high school, notices were sent home when students were truant, listing the class and the date that they missed. Problem was that the attendance records were not always correct, and even if they were, sometimes lines got crossed in the administration office. Substitute teachers, new teachers and really all teachers (at least when classes started in the fall) had issues with attendance - they would mix up names, mark the wrong people absent, sometimes skip attendance altogether. The result was that a good number of false truancy slips were sent out, and a fair amount of the time, students who skipped got away with it.

I would imagine this system would turn out the same way, only slightly more annoying for the parent.