K-12 communication glossary
The vocabulary a district technology director, communications lead or business official runs into when evaluating school-home communication software. Written as reference material, not as marketing.
Why this exists
We built this because it did not exist anywhere else. As of August 2026, none of the three largest platforms in K-12 family communication publishes a glossary. ParentSquare has exactly one "what is" page and it defines one of their own product features. Bloomz and ClassDojo have none at all.
That is a strange gap, because the vocabulary in this category is genuinely confusing and much of it carries legal or financial consequence. Chronic absenteeism and truancy are routinely used interchangeably and are different measures with different owners and different interventions. A2P 10DLC registration determines whether your text messages arrive at all, and the failure mode is silent. Counting "messages sent" instead of families reached will make a district's reach look excellent in exactly the situation where it is worst.
Our bias, stated up front. We sell a school communication platform, so we are not disinterested. We have tried to write entries that would still be useful if you bought something else, and to be explicit where a term is a vendor's coinage rather than an industry standard. Where we describe our own product we say so.
How to use it in an evaluation
Three of these entries contain a question worth asking every vendor you shortlist, including us:
- From OneRoster: "What happens if tonight's roster file contains half the records it did yesterday?" The right answer is that the sync refuses to run and raises an alert. A truncated export that parses cleanly is the failure that silently suppresses messaging to thousands of families.
- From true reach: "Does your delivery figure count carrier acceptance as delivery, and are queued messages in the denominator?" Both change the number materially and both have one-word answers.
- From A2P 10DLC: "What is our registration status, as a date?" Unregistered traffic is filtered by carriers without an error, so the platform reports success while families receive nothing.
None of those are gotchas. They are the questions that separate a platform that has thought about failure from one that has only thought about features, and any vendor who has done the work will answer them quickly.
What we are adding next
This is an early set. The entries in progress cover the rest of the vocabulary a district buying committee encounters:
- Compliance — FERPA, COPPA, SOPIPA, PPRA, data privacy agreements, directory information, and the state-level statutes that increasingly diverge from each other.
- Interoperability — student information systems, Ed-Fi, Clever and ClassLink, SCIM provisioning, single sign-on and SAML.
- Funding and procurement — Title I, Title III and Title IV, E-rate eligibility, purchasing co-operatives, and the difference between an RFP, an RFI and an RFQ.
- Support frameworks — MTSS, RTI, PBIS and tiered intervention, which shape how attendance outreach is actually organised inside a district.
If there is a term you keep having to explain to a board or a vendor, tell us and we will write it.
Questions people actually ask
What is the difference between chronic absenteeism and truancy?
Chronic absenteeism counts all absences — excused, unexcused and suspensions — against a 10% threshold, and is used as an early-warning indicator. Truancy counts only unexcused absences, is defined by state statute, and carries a legal escalation path. A student can be chronically absent without ever being truant.
Do school districts need 10DLC registration to text parents?
If the district sends application-generated SMS from a 10-digit US number, yes. Without it carriers filter the traffic silently — the platform records the message as sent and the family receives nothing.
What should a district ask a communications vendor about rostering?
Whether they support OneRoster, what happens when a roster export arrives truncated, and what a student withdrawal actually does at send time. The last one matters most: if withdrawal only sets a status field nothing reads, families keep receiving messages about a child who left months ago.
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.