SMS Opt-In and Opt-Out for School Districts
Generic vendor pages list the keywords correctly and then stop. The K-12 problem is one layer down: consent is a property of a person and a channel, not of a student, and a district that stores it against the student record will get it wrong for every two-household family in the district.
| Keyword | Effect | Required reply | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| STOP | Suppress this contact point immediately | One confirmation, then silence | That number, that campaign |
| STOPALL | Suppress across every campaign on the number | One confirmation | That number, everything |
| UNSUBSCRIBE | Same as STOP | One confirmation | That number |
| CANCEL | Same as STOP | One confirmation | That number |
| END | Same as STOP | One confirmation | That number |
| QUIT | Same as STOP | One confirmation | That number |
| HELP | No change to consent | Sender identity, contact route, opt-out instruction | Informational only |
| INFO | Same as HELP | Same as HELP | Informational only |
| START | Restore messaging | Confirmation naming the district | That number |
| YES | Restore, where offered as an opt-in reply | Confirmation | That number |
| UNSTOP | Restore | Confirmation | That number |
| PARAR / ALTO | Spanish opt-out — honour it as STOP | Spanish confirmation | That number |
The last row is the one districts miss. A Spanish-speaking parent who replies PARAR or ALTO has revoked consent as clearly as one who typed STOP, whether or not the carrier's automatic handler recognised the word. If your platform does not act on it, somebody in your office has to, and a Spanish opt-out that goes unhonoured for three months is the worst version of this failure.
Consent capture that survives a challenge
Wording for a district registration form or online enrolment field. Short, specific, and it names the channels separately because they are separate.
English. Text messages: [DISTRICT] may send text messages to this number about school closures, emergencies, attendance, transport and school events. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP at any time to stop. Emergency safety messages may still be sent. [ ] Yes, text this number.
Spanish, US-district register. Mensajes de texto: el distrito escolar [DISTRITO] puede enviar mensajes de texto a este número sobre cierres de escuelas, emergencias, asistencia, transporte escolar y eventos escolares. Pueden aplicar tarifas de mensajes y datos. Responda STOP en cualquier momento para dejar de recibirlos. Los mensajes de emergencia pueden seguir enviándose. [ ] Sí, envíen mensajes a este número.
Store, alongside the tick: the exact wording shown, the date and time, the form or portal it came from, the person who submitted it, and the number as entered before normalisation. If you cannot produce the wording a parent agreed to, you have a tick box rather than a consent record.
The two-household problem, in detail
Consider a common case. One student. Two households after a separation. Mother has consented to texts and prefers Spanish. Father has not consented to texts and prefers English. Grandmother is listed as an emergency contact with a mobile and has never been asked anything.
A district that stores "SMS consent" as a field on the student record cannot represent this. It has one flag for three adults. Whatever value it holds is wrong for at least one of them, and the failure modes are both bad: text the father who declined, or fail to text the mother who did not.
The correct model has three axes:
- Person. Consent belongs to an adult, not to a child. The same adult may be guardian to two students at two schools and should not be asked twice or represented twice.
- Contact point. An adult with a work mobile and a personal mobile may consent on one and not the other. Consent attaches to the number.
- Channel and purpose. Consent to attendance texts is not consent to fundraising calls. Store the scope.
Kastr models one person with many effective-dated role rows, so the same adult is genuinely a single identity carrying multiple relationships over time, and every contact point on that person carries its own validation state and consent state along with its source and rank. That structure is the reason the two-household case resolves correctly rather than a feature list item. Ask any vendor to demonstrate this exact scenario in a demo, with a real separation and a real grandmother, and watch what the interface does.
When the only reachable adult has opted out
The scenario: a student's mother has texted STOP, the father's number is disconnected, and there is a lockdown.
The practical position is that a genuine emergency safety message is generally understood to survive an opt-out, which is why mass-notification platforms provide an override. Kastr's emergency flag bypasses per-family channel preferences and quiet hours and is gated on a capability rather than available to every account, and every use writes to the append-only audit log.
Four obligations come with that:
- A written policy defining what qualifies as an emergency send, adopted before it is used, not drafted afterwards.
- A named authoriser. Not "the district" — a person, with a deputy.
- Rarity. A district that flags event reminders as emergencies has spent both the legal argument and the family's attention.
- An after-action record showing when the override was used and by whom, retained.
And one thing that is not an emergency: an attendance notification, however important it feels to the office. If a family has revoked consent and you need to reach them about attendance, that is a letter and a phone call from a person.
Re-permissioning a list you inherited
A district switching platforms frequently inherits a contact list whose consent provenance is unknown or undocumented. The previous vendor recorded a flag; nobody can say what wording produced it.
A defensible re-permission sequence:
- Segment the list. Numbers with a documented consent record, numbers with a flag but no record, and numbers with neither. Treat them differently.
- Do not bulk-text the third group. Reach them through the channels you can defend — email, the registration portal, paper — and ask for consent there.
- For the second group, send one message.
[DISTRICT]: we are moving to a new messaging system. To keep getting school closure, attendance and emergency texts on this number, reply YES. Reply STOP to stop. Questions: [PHONE]. - Fold it into registration. The annual update is the cleanest consent moment in the school year and it is the one districts waste. Put the checkbox and the wording there.
- Record the new consent properly, with wording, timestamp and source, so that the next migration is not this exercise again.
On migration specifically. Kastr's ParentSquare importer is MIT-licensed, runs independently of us, parses the real seven-file export bundle, normalises phone numbers to E.164, maps languages, dedupes contacts, drops guardian records named "mom" or "unknown", and produces a cryptographically signed PDF receipt with a per-file SHA-256 manifest and a full drop ledger. Being exact about what it is: a validator and a procurement artefact. It does not yet write a row into the database — the load step is not built — so it tells you precisely what your data looks like before you commit, which is the right first move on a consent question anyway.
Questions people actually ask
What happens when a parent texts STOP to a school?
That contact point must be suppressed immediately and automatically, with one confirmation message and then silence. The revocation should be recorded against the person, not against a mailing list, or the next campaign built from a different list will re-add them. Spanish equivalents such as PARAR and ALTO should be honoured the same way.
Can a school still send emergency texts to a parent who has opted out?
Genuine emergency safety messages are generally understood to survive an opt-out, and platforms provide an override for exactly that. The obligations that come with it are a written policy defining what qualifies, a named authoriser, real rarity, and a retained record of each use. Routine attendance or event messages do not qualify. General information, not legal advice.
How should a district collect text message consent at registration?
A separate checkbox for text messaging, wording that names the message types and the opt-out keyword, and a note that emergency messages may still be sent. Store the exact wording shown, the timestamp, the source form and the number as entered. A tick with no record of what was agreed to is not a consent record.
Does opting out of school texts also opt a parent out of phone calls?
Not automatically, and the district should decide the behaviour deliberately rather than inheriting a vendor default. A parent who texts STOP has revoked SMS consent on that number; treating that as a revocation across voice and email is an over-application that will cause a family to miss a closure. Ask your vendor whether cross-channel propagation is configurable.
How do you re-permission a parent contact list with unknown consent history?
Segment by what you can document, use non-SMS channels for the numbers you cannot defend, send a single re-permission message to those with a flag but no record, and fold the consent checkbox into annual registration — the cleanest consent moment in the school year. Record wording, timestamp and source this time so the next migration is not a repeat.
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