Anouncements

My kids' schools have adopted a new way of communicating with parents. The pre-recorded telephone call. In years past, I would get pre-recorded calls letting me know when one of my children was unexpectedly absent from class, now I get them for everything. When I say everything, I mean everything that the school or the district would have found important enough to send a paper home, they now send out pre-recorded calls.

In the days before President Obama's speech to our nation's youth was the worst. For two days preceding the speech my husband and I each received two phone calls a day from each school. Considering we have three kids, one in high school, one in jr high school, and one in elementary school, our cell phones were ringing off the hook with recordings of principals letting us know they would be having the children watch the speech and wanting to make sure we were okay with it. You have to listen to the whole message too, if you hang up, it just calls back again.

The old method left a lot to be desired as well, notes that maybe came home or maybe didn't, and when they did they may or may not have been read. After which they would end up in a ridiculously high stack of mostly other notes home but also old newspapers and junk mail before finally making it to the garbage. I agree that the whole thing was an inefficient form of communication and a huge waste of paper. There has got to be a better way.

My suggestion? When registering our children for school why can't we select the preferred form of communication. We could check the box for paper notification, telephone notification or my preferred form, email notification. Just a thought.