Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Communications topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
White Plains schools roll out ParentSquare to replace K12Alerts; district plans phased training and protocols
Summary
District staff demonstrated ParentSquare as the new communications platform, outlining features—single sign-on, automatic translations, posts, alerts and urgent notifications—and plans for summer teacher invitations and staff training to reduce alert fatigue.
The White Plains City School District introduced ParentSquare as its new district-wide communications platform at the July 1 Board meeting. District staff described ParentSquare as a replacement for the district's current mass-notification provider (K12 Alerts) with additional capabilities for classroom communication, automatic translation, templated posts and alerting.
Noah Miller (presentation lead) demonstrated the platform's interface, showing posts (social-media-style messages), targeted groups, templates, smart alerts, urgent alerts (text/email/phone), one-to-one messaging with automatic translation and a forms feature that can replace some DocuSign or form workflows. Miller said ParentSquare supports single sign-on, mobile apps (optional), and automatic translation into the district's five primary languages and up to 200 languages overall.
District staff said ParentSquare could reduce reliance on multiple platforms (Remind, ClassDojo, S'more and parts of DocuSign) and improve reporting (delivery stats, who was reached). The district plans to invite teachers to the platform during the summer, provide professional development hours and use ParentSquare's self-guided training library. Miller and board members cautioned about "alert fatigue" and said the district will develop internal communication protocols to avoid overuse of the platform.
Why this matters: ParentSquare changes how the district communicates with families, staff and students by centralizing messaging, providing automatic translation and expanding classroom-level functionality. The change affects how urgent messages, translations and daily operational communications will be delivered to families.
