Finding out what’s going on in Riverside School District 96 will get a whole lot easier for parents thanks to its new mobile app that will officially launch by month’s end.
The app has already been soft-launched, and is available via the Apple App Store and GooglePlay. It can also be downloaded from the district website.
Among its features is a district news feed, the official district calendar, forms, events listing and the ability to email specific teachers. A user can also enable notifications to receive up-to-date information on the go.
Another feature allows users to watch on YouTube or Facebook a live feed of school board meetings. The app’s launch will also not eliminate the district’s School Messenger communications tool.
“We all hear more and more, ‘We’re getting information from our phone,’” said Superintendent Dr. Martha Ryan-Toye. “A phone is more tailored and concise. We work hard on pushing out our communications, and we’ve been working to improve our social media presence.”
Ryan-Toye said official communications to parents regarding the app will go out this week.
Don Tufano, District 96 director of technology and innovation, said that the district moved last summer to a new web hosting solution called Apptegy, and the app is a component of that company’s service line.
“Not only did we get a refresh of our web presence, their target market is education,” Tufano said. “They look at the content that parents want quick access to, and they put that in the app.
He added that the app isn’t a direct reflection of the website. It’s more of a curated view of what the website offers.
“The way we approached the app, what do parents want quick access to?” he said. “They want school calendars, the lunch menu and other news.”
District apps, along with apps for municipalities, both of which Arkansas-based Apptegy specializes in, are becoming more common, Tufano said.
“When they changed the standard to HTML5 technology, it adapted to the phone or tablet, so you could navigate it on a smaller device,” he said. “It’s serving a different purpose.”
It eliminates the frustration that can come with trying to navigate a conventional website on the smaller screen of a phone or tablet.
Ryan-Toye said that valuable input was received from the district’s Family and Community Partnership Action Team.
“We asked them to vet it for us,” she said. “They gave us some nice feedback about the importance of the app.”
District personnel also provided key input, Tufano said.
“We told our staff about it and got some feedback on it,” he said. “We’d rather have it in folks’ hands and we wanted to fine-tune it a little.”
Future enhancements are TBD, because there are things School Messenger can do that Apptegy can’t at the moment, Tufano said, necessitating the ongoing use of both technologies.
But for now, the community and staff feedback has shown that there is a need for the app and what it offers.
“I would tell you most people have a pretty pragmatic view,” Ryan-Toye said. “The school calendar is important, the lunch menu is important.”
The app is not only for parents, she added.
“Grandma wants to follow along,” she said, “or the babysitter needs to check the lunch menu.”