Remember those days of playing hooky from school and going to the mall with your friends? That might be a thing of the past for students who attend Westside Secondary School (WSS), as the school has just launched an easy way to help parents see if their children are not attending school when they should.

The school already utilizes an auto dialer that calls homes of absent students after they miss school, however, sometimes tricky students erase these voicemails before their parents return home from work. Auto dialers powered by CallFire boast multiple functions besides informing parents of delinquent students, including event reminders for reunions, games, homecoming events, student-parent nights, PTA meetings, community service events, assemblies, graduations, national sorority and fraternity events, event cancellations, emergency notifications in the case of school lockdowns or other unexpected events, weather alerts and school closures, and classroom reminders from teachers about due dates for projects.

With a newly added online feature that is located on the school’s website, parents have the ability to quickly see how often their children have been absent in recent months. According to a recent article on Orangville.com, the online attendance link enables parents to view their children’s attendance daily, past history and what days they were excused by notes or phone calls from guardians. Attendance records are broken down according to each class, allowing parents to quickly see how many days their children have missed, how many days they were excused and how many times they were late to class.

 “It is just kind of an early warning system,” WSS principal Scot Bishop said in a statement.

In most cases, a lack of attendance is heavily related to how a student is scoring, and Bishop commented that the high school felt it was the right direction to take.

 Through the use of technology including auto dialers, parents can stay one step ahead of their children, helping them to reach their highest level of potential in school.

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