School Robocall Scripts for Every Scenario

"Voice length" is the target for the read, not the maximum the system will accept. Every scenario marked "not a call" is one where districts routinely send a broadcast anyway, and where the phone call is the reason families stop answering the phone for the calls that matter.

The six scripts most districts need first

Each is written to be read aloud at roughly 150 words per minute. Nothing in brackets is meant to survive to the recording.

1. Full-day closure, 58 seconds. This is [NAME], [TITLE] at [DISTRICT]. All [DISTRICT] schools are closed today, [DAY], [DATE], because of [REASON]. All schools are closed. There is no bus service and no in-person classes. After-school activities and athletics are cancelled. Childcare in the [PROGRAMME NAME] programme is cancelled. Staff should follow the [CATEGORY] reporting guidance. Today will be made up on [DATE], or is built into the calendar as [DESCRIPTION]. Again, all [DISTRICT] schools are closed today, [DATE]. Updates will be posted at [WEB ADDRESS]. Thank you.

2. Lockdown, in progress, 34 seconds. This is an emergency message from [DISTRICT]. [SCHOOL] is in lockdown. Students and staff are secure inside the building and law enforcement is on site. Do not come to the school. Do not call the school office — the lines must stay open. We will send another message as soon as we have verified information. Again, do not come to the school.

3. All-clear, 41 seconds. This is [NAME] at [DISTRICT] with an update on [SCHOOL]. The lockdown has been lifted. Law enforcement has cleared the building and all students and staff are accounted for. Classes have resumed and dismissal will happen at the normal time, from the normal doors. Counsellors are available at the school today and tomorrow. A letter with more detail will follow this afternoon. Thank you for your patience.

4. Delay becomes closure, 33 seconds. This is [NAME] at [DISTRICT] with a change to this morning's message. The two-hour delay has been changed to a full closure. All [DISTRICT] schools are closed today. If your child is already at a bus stop, please bring them home. Buses are not running. Again, schools are closed today. We are sorry for the change and the short notice.

5. Same-day absence, 29 seconds. This is an attendance message from [SCHOOL]. Our records show [STUDENT FIRST NAME] was not in class today, [DATE], and we do not have a reason on file. If you believe this is an error, please call the attendance office on [PHONE]. Thank you.

6. Testing week, 54 seconds. This is [NAME] at [SCHOOL]. [GRADE LEVEL] students take the [TEST NAME] on [DATES]. Testing begins at [TIME], so please have your child at school by [TIME MINUS 15]. A student who arrives after testing has started cannot join the session and will be scheduled for a make-up day. Please make sure your child eats breakfast — breakfast is served from [TIME] — and brings a charged device if your school has asked for one. If your child is unwell on a testing day, keep them home and call [PHONE]; there is a make-up window on [DATES]. Thank you.

The other sixteen, and what changes in each

• Mid-day early release. Two messages, not one. The first announces the release time and says the second will confirm bus times. The parking lot chaos is caused by one message that tries to do both.
• Evacuation and relocation. The relocation address is the only fact that matters. Say it three times, spell the street name, and do not put anything before it except the school name.
• Reunification instructions. Site address, ID requirement, entrance to use, and the sentence that students are only released to an adult listed on the emergency card. See the reunification templates.
• Correction of an alert sent in error. Leads with the correction, not with an apology. "The message you received at 6:12 was sent in error" is the first sentence. The apology is the last.
• Attendance pattern outreach. Never a broadcast. This one is a live call from a person — see attendance call scripts.
• Enrolment window. Dates, what to bring, and one phone number. Districts habitually list six documents on a recorded call; nobody writes them down.
• Kindergarten round-up. The one broadcast where a warm tone is correct. Still under 60 seconds.
• Event reminder. Should almost always be a text. A recorded call about a book fair is how you train families to ignore the closure call.
• Event cancelled. Short, specific, and states whether the event is rescheduled or gone.
• Athletics change. Text. Includes the sport, the level, the new time and the venue.
• Bus route disruption. Route number, affected stops, expected delay in minutes, and whether supervision is available at the school.
• Meal balance. Not a call. A phone broadcast about a negative lunch balance is a dignity problem and in several states a policy violation. See lunch shaming laws by state.
• Immunisation deadline. A call is appropriate for the final reminder before exclusion, because exclusion is a serious consequence and the family must have had a real chance to act.
• Survey request. Email. If it is worth a phone call it is not a survey.
• Thank-you broadcast. Once or twice a year, maximum. The value is entirely in its rarity.
• Heat, air quality or building-systems closure. Covered in full on the closure script page, which carries twelve closure variants rather than one.

What a broadcast call may not say

Two separate bodies of rule apply, and districts routinely conflate them.

FERPA governs the content. A phone broadcast is a disclosure. It reaches every household in the audience, including households that have no relationship to the student being discussed. That means no named student, no disciplinary detail, no health condition, no special-education status, no immigration or housing information, and nothing that would let a listener identify a particular child by elimination — "the fourth-grade student who was taken to hospital" identifies a child in a small school as effectively as a name does. If the message is about one student, it is a call to one family, not a broadcast.

The TCPA governs whether you may place the call at all, and on what number, at what hour, to a family that has asked you to stop. It has a school exemption and an emergency-purpose exemption, and neither is as broad as districts assume. The full treatment is on TCPA compliance for schools; the summary is that operational school messages to a number a family gave the school sit comfortably inside the exemptions, and anything that shades towards fundraising, a partner organisation, a ballot measure or a vendor promotion does not.

Three more content rules that come from experience rather than statute:

• No unverified facts, ever, on a recorded line. A recording is quoted. Say what you know, say what you do not, and say when you will know more.
• No "there is no danger" before the incident is cleared. If you are wrong, that sentence is the one that gets played on the evening news.
• No staff member's name attached to an incident, including in the sign-off, when the incident involves that person.

How these get sent, and the two things Kastr cannot do

The mechanics that matter when the script is written and it is 05:40.

• Send the text first, then the call. Text arrives in seconds and survives a busy signal. A voice call arriving alone at 05:40 wakes a household that then has to listen to sixty seconds of audio to learn one fact.
• Failover, not duplication. Kastr fails over from SMS to voice on terminal SMS failure, on the same contact point, with the two delivery records linked. That is a different thing from sending both to everybody, which costs twice as much and trains families to ignore one of them.
• Idempotency. The delivery queue claims rows with SELECT … FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED under a five-minute claim TTL, performs network I/O outside the transaction, and holds a row-level unique key per broadcast, person and channel. In practice: pressing send twice, or a worker crashing mid-run, does not produce a family that receives the closure call four times at 05:41.
• Quiet hours. Default 21:00–07:00, bypassed only by an explicitly emergency-flagged send, which is capability-gated. A closure call at 05:40 requires that flag, deliberately.
• Preview before you commit. The composer shows a live per-channel cost and reach estimate as you tick channels, renders a translation preview so you can read the Spanish before a family does, and sends a test to you alone with a [TEST] prefix.

Questions people actually ask

Related