ParentLink® Adds Grades and Attendance to its K-12 Mobile Apps

PROVO, Utah, Nov. 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- ParentLink® today announced the release of its newest iPhone applications for K-12 users of the ParentLink communication service. The Mobile Parent and Mobile Admin apps were both initially launched earlier in the year and have been enthusiastically received by parents and administrators at school districts around the country. Parents and administrators using these apps will now have access to grades, assignments, attendance, and more.

Hemet Unified School District has been a ParentLink customer for several years and is now piloting several advanced ParentLink modules that bring even more functionality to the mobile apps. The new Mobile Parent app gives parents a single location where they can view or hear messages as well as have access to a host of information relating to their child's education. Besides being able to view their children's classes, grades, assignments and attendance, Parents can also instantly contact teachers or view a directory containing the phone number and address of every school in the district. Parents can set alerts so they will be notified the instant their child has a missing assignment, receives a low score, or when a teacher updates a child's grade or when a child receives a grade below a certain pre-set threshold. The new app makes it significantly easier for parents to know exactly what is going on with their child's education—all from their iPhone.

One of the strategic initiatives that Hemet USD is focusing on during the 2010-2011 school year is to improve student attendance in the district. "We know that increasing parental involvement in a child's education is the single best predictor of student success," said Dr. Steven Lowder, Superintendent at Hemet USD. "And the most effective and efficient way to accomplish that is through good, consistent communication. It's a new age of communication and ParentLink gives us tools like these mobile apps that make it easy to communicate with the parents and help promote learning for the kids."

"We were first to market with our mobile parent app when it was launched earlier in the year and both of these mobile apps have been extremely well received," said Mark Child, VP of Marketing at ParentLink. "With the addition of such important features as grades and attendance, these apps are even more powerful. And to see how Hemet is using them to such tremendous effect is extremely rewarding. Hemet administrators are saving time by using the Mobile Admin app and Hemet's parents are quickly realizing how easy it is to see all of the information relating to their child's educational experience, all in one place."

One key reason Hemet administrators are excited about the Mobile Parent app is how it provides critical information to those families who may not have previously had Internet access in their homes. With the rapid growth of smartphone sales among lower income families, they will no longer be left out of the information loop. The ParentLink Mobile Parent app provides those parents with a powerful way to stay engaged in their children's educational activities. The ParentLink services provide educationally-related communication to millions of students' homes all across the country. The Mobile Parent app gives those parents the ability to remain informed and engaged regardless of time or location. Once the app is installed, parents simply use their existing ParentLink account to log in and review the available information.

The ParentLink Mobile Parent and Mobile Admin apps are free and immediately available for download from the iPhone App Store. For more information about all of the solutions from ParentLink, please visit: http://www.parentlink.net.

About ParentLink®
ParentLink is the complete communication solution for education, providing the tools to link schools, parents, students, and the community in one common objective—to improve the educational process. Exclusively serving the K-12 market for over 20 years, ParentLink provides administrators with a communication platform that will keep parents engaged and students achieving. ParentLink is the central communications hub for all of a district's various information systems, allowing educators to communicate the right information in the right way and at the right time. Every week, thousands of schools use ParentLink to securely send millions of messages to students, parents, and the community, in the form of phone calls, emails, SMS text messages, Facebook and Twitter posts, printed letters, and fax messages, or via the web. ParentLink is the all-in-one communication solution, helping educators improve parental outreach efforts and enjoy the benefits of increased student achievement.

Media Contact:
Mark G. Child
[email protected]
+1.801.373.9669 x203

SOURCE ParentLink