For principals: the building's communication runs through you whether or not anyone planned it
Nobody wrote building communications into your job description, and it is somewhere between a fifth and a third of your week. ParentSquare does not have a page for you at all; this one is written from the actual sequence of a bad Tuesday.
| Incident | Send? | Audience | The threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bus running 20+ minutes late | Yes | Affected families | Any delay a parent would notice at the stop. Silence generates calls; a two-line text does not. |
| Power out, school still operating | Yes | Whole building | Send before the first child texts a parent from a dark classroom. |
| Lockdown or shelter-in-place, in progress | Yes | Whole building, emergency flag | Send the fact and the instruction. Do not wait for details you do not have. |
| Lockdown lifted | Yes | Whole building | Always. The all-clear is the message families remember you for. |
| Fight in the cafeteria, two students | Usually not building-wide | Families involved | Send building-wide only if students filmed it, because the video will arrive before your message does. |
| Staff member on leave, long term | Yes | Affected classes | Before day three. Rumour fills the gap faster than a substitute does. |
| Head lice identified in one class | Class only | That class | Building-wide notification identifies the child by elimination in a small school. |
| Norovirus, multiple classes | Yes | Whole building | Two or more classrooms affected in 48 hours. |
| Water fountain shut off | No | — | Tell staff. A building-wide message about plumbing trains families to ignore you. |
| Schedule change inside one week | Yes | Affected families | Any change that alters pick-up time by more than ten minutes. |
| Something a local reporter has already called about | Yes | Whole building, with the district | Families should hear it from you before they read it. Loop in the communications director first, not after. |
The 6:40am problem
The message that matters most is the one you write from a car park with one hand while the buses are being re-routed. Three things determine whether that goes well:
- Can you send without asking permission? Building-scoped sending is a configuration, and in most districts the right answer is yes for your own building and no for the district. What matters is that the boundary is enforced rather than trusted — in Kastr it is row-level isolation in the database, so a building account cannot resolve an audience outside its own school even if a URL is edited.
- Does the platform stop you making the expensive mistake? Quiet hours default to 21:00–07:00, which means a message you write at 6:40am does not go out until seven unless you flag it as an emergency. That is deliberate. The emergency flag bypasses quiet hours and per-family channel preferences, and it is gated on a capability rather than a checkbox anyone has.
- Do you find out what it cost? The composer shows a per-channel estimate before you send. For a 600-student building, the difference between texting everyone and emailing everyone is visible on screen at the moment you choose.
Being told what the office already told a parent
The recurring failure in building communication is not the mass message. It is the individual conversation. A parent calls at 8:10, the office manager answers, gives a reasonable answer, and you find out at 8:45 when the parent quotes it back to you in the corridor.
Two mechanisms help. First, single identity: one person record carries effective-dated roles, so the parent who is also a paraprofessional and also a PTA officer is one person in the system, not three accounts whose conversations live in different places. Second, the audit log — every send and every audience resolution is written to a per-organisation hash chain, so "what did we tell that family, and when" is a lookup rather than a memory test.
What does not exist and would help you: a unified conversation view that stitches together the office phone call, which is not in the system at all. If somebody answers the phone, the software cannot know what they said. That is a process problem, and the front-office guide is about reducing the number of times it arises.
PTA, boosters and the volunteer who should not have admin
The wrong fix is a shared login. Every district has at least one building where the PTA president has the office's password, because giving them a real account meant giving them the console. That is a data-protection incident waiting for a resignation.
Kastr's volunteer group governance lets a parent volunteer post as the group and manage their own membership with no district-console access at all. Posts carry the group's identity publicly, while the audit log records the individual who actually pressed send, so accountability survives the identity. If a family reports a post, it lands in a moderation queue with four outcomes — dismiss, warn, remove the post, archive the group — and each of those is logged.
You get to say yes to the booster club without adding a person to your admin list.
What this product will not do for your building
- No attachments, photos or video. Your teachers will notice on day one. It is not built.
- No push notifications. The family experience is a web app; there is no app-store push.
- No grade-level targeting. Today only "specific people" and "everyone" resolve, so "all third-grade families" means building a specific-people selection rather than picking a grade. That is real friction and we are not going to describe it as flexibility.
- No automated notices. Attendance and lunch-balance rules can be configured; nothing fires them yet.
- No approval workflow. If your district requires sign-off before a building message leaves, that is enforced by policy and people, not by the software.
What you do get is a send path that shows you the cost, previews the translation, tests to yourself first, respects quiet hours by default, and writes an audit record you can produce nine months later when it matters.
Questions people actually ask
Can I send a building-wide message without going through the district office?
That depends on how your district configures scope, and the boundary is enforced in the database rather than in the interface. A building-scoped account cannot resolve an audience outside its own school, so if your district grants you building sending, you can send at 6:40am without waiting for anyone.
Will a message I send at 9pm wake up 600 families?
No. Quiet hours default to 21:00–07:00 and are applied at dispatch, so a message composed at 9pm is held until seven. The only thing that bypasses quiet hours is an emergency-flagged send, which is gated on a capability rather than available to everyone.
How do I know a message actually reached a family rather than just left the system?
Honestly, no platform can tell you a human read a text. What you should insist on is a delivery report that distinguishes "accepted by the carrier" from "delivered to the handset", because unregistered or filtered SMS is silently dropped. Our own insights view currently folds one of those states into the other — a defect we have documented rather than hidden, and the reason the reach guide exists.
Can our PTA post to their own group without me giving them admin access?
Yes. A volunteer can post as the group and manage its membership with zero district-console access. The post shows the group's identity; the audit log records the individual who actually sent it. Reported posts go to a four-outcome moderation queue and every action is logged.
What happens if I send to the wrong audience?
You cannot unsend a delivered SMS — nobody can. What you can do is send a test to yourself first, which arrives prefixed [TEST], and check the recipient count and cost estimate the composer shows before you commit. Both take about fifteen seconds and prevent the majority of these incidents.
One price. Every feature. Locked for three years.
$3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students. No tiers, no add-on modules, no per-message fees. Published on the site because you should not have to book a call to learn a price.