District-wide messages
Updates from the superintendent, the school board and each department go to every family in the district.
SchoolMessenger emails
SchoolMessenger is how many districts send everything: the superintendent's update, the school newsletter, attendance notices, closures. Forward them to Sense and the dates go straight onto your family calendar.
On the family calendar
No school - Mon Nov 2 Book fall conference - by Fri Oct 23The volume
SchoolMessenger is built for mass messages. The district, each school, and some programs all send through it, often by email, text and phone at the same time.
Updates from the superintendent, the school board and each department go to every family in the district.
Many schools send their weekly newsletter through SchoolMessenger, often with the real content in a linked newsletter or an attached PDF.
Absence notices, late arrivals, weather delays and closures arrive as their own messages.
An email, a text and a robocall for one announcement. Easy to tune out, and then the one that mattered gets tuned out too.
What parents try
Each SchoolMessenger email has an opt-out link. Use it and you stop seeing the closure notices too, and getting back on means calling the school.
You can choose phone, text or email for each category. Useful, but the general category is where the newsletters and dates live.
The newsletter has most of the dates, but it is long and the one you need is in the middle.
How it works
Step 01
Verify your email address in Sense once, then forward SchoolMessenger emails to share@getsense.ai. Digests and attachments included.
Step 02
It pulls out the dates, times, what to bring, and anything to sign or pay. Emails with nothing to schedule are left alone.
Step 03
Events land on your family calendar, with reminders for deadlines, so everyone sees the same plan.
Premium lets you set up a Gmail filter that sends every one of these emails to your personal Sense address the moment it arrives. Sense reads each one, adds what has a date, and ignores the rest. How to set up auto-forwarding.
The free plan covers 10 emails a month for the whole family, which is enough to forward the ones that matter. A busy school on auto-forward will need Premium, which is unlimited. See pricing.
A week of SchoolMessenger
Some SchoolMessenger emails do not include the content: they link to a newsletter page, or to an attachment behind a "secure document" page. Sense follows those links and reads the newsletter or the PDF, so you can forward the email as it is.
FAQ
Log in to your SchoolMessenger or district account and set which categories reach you by email. Avoid the opt-out link at the bottom of an email, since that can stop emergency emails too. Then forward the emails that remain to Sense so the dates reach your calendar.
Yes. Sense follows SchoolMessenger's secure document links and linked newsletter pages, and reads the PDF or page behind them.
Yes, through Sense. Forward the email and Sense creates the events on your family calendar, which can connect to Google Calendar.
No. An absence notice has nothing to schedule, so Sense does not turn it into an event.
Other school apps
SchoolMessenger is a trademark of its owner. Sense is not affiliated with or endorsed by SchoolMessenger.
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