Dear parents and guardians,
The way we send emergency messages and newsletters from your child’s school is about to get better.
It’s incredibly important that you are kept informed about what’s happening at your school, especially when an emergency happens. To improve on how we do that, the School District of South Milwaukee is beginning to roll out ParentSquare, a messaging service that allows parents and caregivers to choose how and when to get messages.
The most significant change is that starting in November, emergency messages about your child’s school - like weather closings and safety alerts from our Standard Response Protocol - will be delivered to you by a combination of text, email, voicemail, and app notifications (for those who choose to download the ParentSquare app.)
ParentSquare will also be used to send non-emergency messages from your student’s school office (newsletters, general reminders, and letters from the principal to all parents).
Using ParentSquare instead of a combination of messaging services (Infinite Campus, regular email, newsletter services, etc.) will provide several improvements we’ve had parents ask for, and which were included in our five-year strategic plan like:
Sending notifications by text message;
Including multiple parents or caregivers in regular and emergency messaging;
Choosing to get messages as they are sent or in a digest once a day (emergency messages will come immediately, regardless of settings)
Standardizing how we get messages from each school for families who have students in more than one building (for example, middle and high school);
Putting messages from schools in one place (the ParentSquare app allows you to see messages for all of your children in the app’s feed);
Providing messages home in a family’s primary language and
Allowing our coaches and adult mentors a way to safely text parents and students about changes to practices/games/events.
The first step is implementing ParentSquare at the school and district levels. Once we become experts at using it, we’ll roll it out to teachers in the 2025-26 school year for classroom-level communications.
On Monday, October 28th, you will receive an invitation to register with ParentSquare or download the app to set up your preferred contact method. This is not required.
If you choose not to, you will still receive messages from your school via phone calls, email (as you have in the past), and/or text.
On Tuesday, October 29th, we’ll send out a test alert to acclimate everyone to the new notifications.
If you have questions or run into a problem, please email info@sdsm.k12.wi.us
