A new app is setting out to make mitching from school a thing of the past.
The parental alert system is hoping to slash the costs of sending individual, class or all school text alerts to parents and guardians.
SchoolAlerts.ie will also put an end to taking the odd recreational day out for pupils across the nation's 3,800 primary and secondary schools.
System founder, Brendan Cunningham, says research they have done shows that sending messages to parents across traditional SMS system was costing schools as much as 7c.
While up to 4% of messages sent out thorough text in bulk were getting lost in cyberspace.
He says: "Instead we send alerts to parents using smartphone apps.
"These are known as 'push notifications' and school managers and parents are more than likely familiar with them already through various trusted and secure chat applications such as Viber, Facebook Messenger and Telegram.
"Because push notifications do not cost us, they do not cost the school either.
"Instead of charging for individual alerts like SMS companies would, we charge a far smaller, annual flat fee for our service and schools can send each message for free during the school year."
Image: Supplied to Newstalk.com
He says several of the schools they have engaged with were spending an average €1,000 a year on texts.
Parents receive all alerts to their preferred app for free.
The apps that the system operates across are also free so there are no app download costs for the parent.
All parents do is register their phone number on the service website so the team can independently verify that they are part of a school's contact list.
"If somebody tries to register on our site with a mobile that we do not recognise from a school's contact lists, then they will not be allowed to sign up", Mr Cunningham adds.
Schools can signup and enter their Roll number.
Alerts can then be sent to the entire school, to individual classes or to individual parents in the event of an unexplained absence.
The school also owns the database of parent contact information, and therefore the school is the data controller.
