San Francisco USD Rolls Out Notifications to 111 Schools

Following a 20-school pilot program last spring, California's San Francisco Unified School District is rolling out a new parental notification system across 111 schools for the 2009-2010 school year.

For the rollout, the district chose School Loop, which will be used to communicate with families of students who speak more than 20 different languages. In addition to providing notifications, School Loop is a Web system for K-12 schools that provides content management capabilities, WYSIWYG editing, secure hosting, digital lockers, and other portal features. It includes pre-designed templates, rights management, support for teacher sites, electronic commerce features, news publishing, and reporting, among other features.

Using School Loop's notification features, teachers will be able to deliver assignments, grades, and attendance in nightly e-mails to parents in their native languages. For those parents who don't with to subscribe to the e-mail service, TeleParent's phone notification system is also being offered. It delivers phone notifications (including emergency communications) in parents' native languages.

The system is being deployed this semester.

San Francisco Unified School District serves more than 55,000 students in 111 K-12 schools, including nine charter schools, as well as 34 preschools and eight county/court schools.

About the Author

David Nagel is the former editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal, STEAM Universe, and Spaces4Learning. A 30-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art, marketing, media, and business publications.

He can be reached at [email protected]. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrnagel/ .


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