Mitching from school could become impossible in Ireland with a new text alert service

Mitchin' impossible. Get it? GET IT?

Bunking off school is definitely not something that we encourage. It's dangerous and can cause loads of problems for parents and teachers alike. But it's naive to think that it doesn't happen. It could be a case of just wandering around the school for an hour instead of going to class, or missing full days of school at a time. But mitching may be about to become a thing of the past, if a new parental alert system is implemented across schools in Ireland. The system, schoolalerts.ie, operates across trusted mobile apps will slash the costs of sending individual, class or all-school alerts to parents and guardians. The system will automatically inform each individual parent of any potential issue - such as mitching - free of charge and is designed to increase safety in schools without having to break the bank. System founder, Brendan Cunningham, says research shows that sending messages to parents across the traditional, old SMS system was costing schools as much as seven cents per message. And up to 4% of messages sent out via SMS in bulk were getting lost in cyberspace. Commenting on the proposed alert system, Cunningham said: “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. Several of the schools we’ve engaged with were spending an average of €1,000 a year on texts. Our flat fee (€299 per year inclusive of VAT) is a fraction of this,” Cunningham explained. Parents will receive the app of their choice completely free with no download cost. For more information, you can visit the official website here.