School trounces truancy with SMS

By Staff and wire reports

SINGAPORE -- Children at a Singapore school will need to think twice about playing truant.

The Yishun Town Secondary School has kicked off a mobile phone text message broadcast system which automatically alerts parents of disobedient students.

"I was hoping that through this system I actually reduce the amount of administrative work for teachers (and) enhance the home-school links," says school principal Tan Teck.

Teachers will mark the names of absent students in an electronic database.

The mobile phone text message or Short Message Service (SMS) broadcast system, supplied by local technology provider WorldRemind, taps into the database and automatically sends out a message to parents telling them their child is missing from class.

The cost of the system is about $2,760.

A mobile attendance system

Parents can choose from one of four pre-set SMS responses providing an excuse for the child's absence or stating they are unaware of their child's whereabouts.

Teachers will obtain a summary of the day's attendance once the system has received parents' replies.

"The idea is to cut down response time for the teachers and for the parents... not to cause more stress for the student," says WorldRemind chairman Victor Lim.

Close to 400 13-year old students will test the system initially but Tan plans to have the 1,400-strong school fully wired before the end of the year. About 70 percent of parents have mobile phones, Tan says.

Mobile phone text messaging, introduced to the city-state in 1995, has become an extremely popular means of communication with users punching out millions of messages per day.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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