ParentLink® Releases Attendance Discovery™, Advanced Technology for K-12 Educators Striving to Increase Student Achievement Through Better Attendance

PROVO, Utah, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- ParentLink® announced today the release of Attendance Discovery™, its suite of powerful applications and reporting tools that make it possible for K-12 school administrators and principals to track, measure and reduce student absences. With Attendance Discovery™, educators can involve themselves in positive attendance policies and actions before absences become an issue.

"Using the ParentLink notification system as part of our overall district attendance program, the Albuquerque Public Schools have seen more schools achieve their goal of having at least a 95 percent attendance rate," said Rigo Chavez, director of communications for the Albuquerque schools.

Automated notifications are the foundation of a successful student attendance initiative. However, achieving a long-term reduction in absences requires strategies that consist of early intervention tactics, administrators who care, and the right technology. The release of Attendance Discovery adds a critical component to the ParentLink communications platform. With Attendance Discovery, educators now have a powerful tool to help them in their ongoing efforts to make a real difference in the lives of their students.

"ParentLink has provided communication solutions to K-12 school districts for over 20 years," said John Graff, CEO of ParentLink. "Designed by educators for educators, Attendance Discovery gives administrators and principals access to the information they need in order to know exactly what the attendance issues are and how to proactively address them."

Attendance Discovery includes the following modules:

Dynamic Messaging: The heart of Attendance Discovery, Dynamic Messaging allows educators to create and send content-specific attendance threshold messages that are designed to meet specific district attendance policies. Dynamic Messaging facilitates two-way communication with parents by providing:

• Custom or pre-scripted messages via phone, email, SMS text, web, printed letter, and fax—in multiple languages
• Parents can record and reply with an absence excuse over the phone
• Automatically print attendance violation letters that meet legal requirements

Policy Planner: With this tool, administrators can create the policies and procedures that will help them reach the objectives of their attendance initiatives. Policy Planner will help districts customize absence thresholds in order to get more out of their efforts and meet state and district requirements.

Events Tracker: This powerful tool gives administrators the ability to track their efforts through graphs displaying real-time data from every communication. This makes it easy to immediately identify which communications are effective and which ones are not. Events Tracker allows administrators to:

• Determine the impact of a specific attendance campaign
• Identify when an attendance message is losing effectiveness.
• Track specific message types
• Track historically poor attendance and recognize potential trends

Watch List: This critical component allows educators to track students who are most at risk of dropping out of school. This tool eliminates paper lists and gives administrators and principals real, up-to-date information on high-violation students. Watch List allows educators to:

• Acknowledge and record actions taken in notifying parents of chronic non-attenders
• Monitor student attendance levels at the student, school, and district levels
• Flag schools struggling with attendance initiatives
• Target at-risk students for early intervention

Student File Cabinet: Educators are no longer faced with the painful and time-consuming task of trying to access student data from multiple locations and applications. With the Student File Cabinet tool, Attendance Discovery provides a safe and easy way to consolidate pertinent student data for quick, one-stop access. The Student File Cabinet allows educators to:

• Utilize a centralized, paperless way to track all communications
• Track attendance data, communication history, and more
• Upload student photos for easy identification
• Attach any other relevant documents to a student's file

For more information about ParentLink and Attendance Discovery, please visit http://www.parentlink.net/attendancediscovery.

About ParentLink®

ParentLink is dedicated to helping educators increase student achievement through superior school-to-home communication technology. Headquartered in Provo, Utah, ParentLink has exclusively served the K-12 market for over 20 years, providing school districts with the technology needed to link principals, teachers, parents, students and the community together through our web portal and messaging services. Every week, educators all over the country use ParentLink to securely send millions of messages to students, parents, and the community, in the form of phone calls, emails, SMS or text messages, printed letters, and fax messages, or via the web. ParentLink helps educators improve parental outreach efforts and enjoy the benefits of increased student achievement.

SOURCE ParentLink