PowerSchool Contacts and School Messenger

Linn-Mar is partnering with School Messenger, a text service provider to better communicate with our families in case of emergencies, weather, or school closings.

In order to receive the text messages and other important information, we remind families to please update their PowerSchool contact information.

We’ve provided screenshots below to help you through the process of updating your contacts.  In short, if your contact is not fully filled out or if your main phone number is listed as ‘home’ and not ‘mobile’ you would not receive a text.

Please Update your Powerschool Information:

1. School Messenger is looking for the top two active contact accounts that have an email or phone number associated with them. If an active account is at the top but does not have any phone or email address, it will be skipped, as there is no way to contact that person.
2. Additionally, School Messenger will ONLY send text messages to phones tagged as “mobile”. So, if a number is listed as “daytime”, “home”, or “work”, it will not try to text that number. Update your contact information and change phone to mobile.

Here’s How:

1. Log in to PowerSchool, you will see two options for contacts. Update and Sort. These will be near the bottom of the left-hand side.
2. Click on update contacts and you will see tabs near the top of the page that list each contact.
3. Click on any tab to update that contact. Under Phones, make sure that any mobile numbers are appropriately tagged as mobile.

 

How to Sort your Contacts:

1. School Messenger looks for the top two accounts that have at least one phone number or email address. On this screen, you can click the arrows to move people up and down the list. The contact listed at the top of the priority list will be contacted first in the event of an emergency.

Once this is all entered correctly, you should automatically receive a text from School Messenger the next morning. You will be all set to receive future text notifications from the district AND building-specific information.