Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

I just checked and there are 16 messages from one school in the last 7 days. The other school have managed 11. Those are emails, containing PDFs, containing important dates, if you can find them.

View on HN

At least they are e-mails. Schools and kindergartens in Poland all switched over to some garbage SaaS that incorporates a half-assed, barely functioning faux-e-mail service, so I have to actually log in to their confusing and ad-infested website every other day and check if the facility sent something new. I would love it if we were using e-mails instead.

One of those is emails - the 16 notifications were push notifications through the app we have to use.

>Schools and kindergartens in Poland all switched over to some garbage SaaS that incorporates a half-assed, barely functioning faux-e-mail service

Ahhh, Librus. Worse than useless.

The one and only.

I dream that one day organizations will learn that you can in fact just put your message in plain text in the message body, rather than a 1MB PDF or docx

"I don't have time to learn all this freaky techbabble, I have a day job. Why can't you just use Word like a normal person?"

Oh god, schools are the worst. So many messages, very few of them that need to be read. Result: parents don’t read them, then teachers wonder why parents never know any of the stuff they’re sending home.

Let’s go back to physical letters and notes in backpacks.

Yeah, dealing with schools doesn't fill me with hope about our kids future.

Here's a email with a PDF containing important dates and updates about the cursive program.

Lol, great.

It’s even worse than that - every class has a parent led WhatsApp group set up where people then regurgitate the same info into the chat.

I suggested maybe a calendar instead but got the standard “it’s all too hard” responses.

Unfortunately they have to if they want to make sure parents get it. Every week my school's sends out a weekly email of everything happening in the quarter with emphasis increasing as time get closer. Then there's emails for when parents actually have to do something like sign up. There's physical flyers. There's the private Facebook like app that reiterates when parents have to do something. And the public Google calendar. Parents STILL miss it. And it's not even a few. At this point I just assume I have to tell people in person with my own mouth if I want to make sure they'll do the thing for their kid (and thus make my kid's day better)

"We should have an app for our school, it's only $x00"

Me: What does it do?

Calendar and notifications about new posts

Me: The website already does that, there's a button to click to subscribe to the calendar, another to subscribe to notifications, and you can "install" the website if you want, all with open standards

Surprising, I actually won the argument and they didn't waste their money.

I mean, the school districts I've had kids in all had Microsoft 365 or gmail for the kids, I assume the staff is in the same system. Its really not that hard to send out invites and searchable emails.

it's parents they're trying to reach

Reply on news.ycombinator.com