ECISD starts up Parentlink

On Wednesday evening, parents across Ector County Independent School District received a recorded message from ECISD superintendent Hector Mendez, welcoming them to a new school year and introducing the new Parentlink system.

ECISD officials held a news conference on Thursday morning to formally announce the new communication system.

“It’s a big improvement on the old system, and we’re hoping it will be a much better way of communicating with our parents and the community,” Mendez said.

Parentlink is a messaging system that will call and e-mail parents when there is information that needs to be transmitted to parents. When a student is absent, the Parentlink system will call twice a day to notify parents of the absence. When there is a school emergency, like bad weather or a shelter-in-place, parents are notified via phone calls and e-mails. The system cost the district $57,200 — or $2.20 per student.

Once a parent has registered their student, the information is automatically entered into the system.

ECISD communications director Mike Adkins said they decided to adopt a new system because the old one, the E-Alert System wasn’t really being used. To be included in that system, parents had to go online and register, and after two years there were only about 2,000 parents registered in the system.

“The E-Alert System just wasn’t meeting the needs of what we wanted to do,” Adkins said. Adkins said he started looking for a system that would fit the district’s needs and decided on the Parentlink System.

The Parentlink system was up and running in the first few days of school, and it’s already been put to work, Adkins said.

After receiving a report that shots had been fired in the area, Austin Montessori principal Sylvia Sanchez was advised to put the school in shelter-in-place, where all of the entrances to the school are locked, and school continues to go on inside the building. Sanchez needed to contact parents to let them know when the shelter-in-place order was lifted. She made one phone call to the Parentlink system and notified most of the parents on the list.

Sanchez said she was very impressed with the new system.

“It’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful tool to have for our campuses, and it’s exciting for principals to have this,” Sanchez said.