New Safe Arrival System Starting Thursday, October 6^th, 2016

October 5^th, 2016

Dear Parent/Guardian,

At Ventura Park Public School, one of our greatest priorities is ensuring that all our students arrive safely to school each and every day.  As a part of our safe arrival process, a daily absence check is conducted by office staff and often involves:

• Checking phone messages left by parents regarding sick calls for students
• Phoning parents whose child is absent but no notification has been made to the school
• Recording all absences in the attendance system

This process can be inefficient and time consuming for schools and for parents.

To enhance our existing absence check procedure, Ventura Park Public School is one of a number of schools introducing a new, more efficient student absence or late arrival reporting system. This new system will reduce the time it takes to verify student attendance making it easier for you to report your child’s absence and easier for staff to respond to unaccounted student absences. 

We will be introducing a new absence reporting system to our parent community, called Safe Arrival. It will allow parents to report their child’s absence quickly and conveniently in one of three ways:

1. Parents can call into an automated interactive telephone system via a toll free number (1-855-203-2994) through which absences can be reported.

1. Parents can log into a website, yorkrdsb.schoolconnects.com to authenticate their Portal account to report absences and update contact information.

1. Parents who have authenticated their accounts and have either an iOS or Android device can download an app that can be used to report absences.

The system will be available 24 hours/day, 7 days a week.  Future absences can be reported at any time. 

In addition, we will also be introducing an automated notification system already used by our High Schools to contact parents who have not reported their child absent. The automated notification system will contact parents at multiple contact numbers until one of the designated contacts is reached. If our system is unable to reach a designated contact after 20 minutes, office staff will follow up. 

By reporting your child absent in advance using the Safe Arrival toll free number, you will NOT receive a call.

We will start using our new absence reporting system on Thursday October 6^th, 2016.  

As of October 6^th, all absence and late arrival reporting must go through the toll free number.  Please do not contact or send notes to the school or classroom teacher to report an absence or late arrival.

To assist you in using this easy system, we have included a business card, containing the toll free number that you can keep in a convenient location for quick reference when reporting your child’s absence or late arrival.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation during this transition period to better ensure the safety of all our children.​​