Email Update

Dear Parents/Guardians:

I recently notified the community that we were conducting an investigation into the cause of the email failure that some parents experienced during our email communication with the PreK-8 parent community regarding the October 24th lockdown at the Adams, Miller and Placentino Schools. As background, we solicit parent email addresses each fall as part of the student registration process and store those email addresses in our Student Information System (called iPass). In addition, parents who have access to iPass through the “Parent Portal” can update their email addresses when necessary. Parents who have provided their email address to us in previous years are not required to re-share that information annually.  Several times a year, we extract the email addresses from our iPass database and upload them into the database used by our email notification system, called iContact. iContact is a commercially-available email marketing system that offers the ability to distribute emails to large email lists. This functionality is not available in iPass. Our investigation has concluded that some email addresses were inadvertently deleted from our iContact database during a recently-conducted manual periodic-maintenance review of our email lists. After discovering this human error, we performed new extraction of email addresses from iPass and uploaded them into iContact, providing us with an up-to-date email list for each school and the district. 

People who were not receiving emails earlier this fall from iContact should now be receiving Announcements in their inbox (they will show on your email server as being sent by:
HPSAnnouncements hpsannouncements@holliston.k12.ma.us via icontactmail3.com ). If this is not the case, it is likely due to one of three possible reasons:

1. your email address has a misspelling in iPass and your email is being returned as undeliverable;
   
2. the “SPAM” filter in your individual email account is identifying the email as “Junk” and placing those emails in your “Junk” folder. If this is the case, you need to reconfigure your email account to allow emails from: HPSAnnouncements hpsannouncements@holliston.k12.ma.us via icontactmail3.com
   
3. the firewall on your email server is blocking all emails from iContact. We find this from time to time, particularly if you are asking that emails be sent to a corporate email system (your work email, for example). If you are not receiving emails from HPS on your corporate server, we recommend you contact your corporate IT department and ask them to pass-through emails from iContact, or that you change the email account to which you want emails sent to a private email account through vendors such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.
   
4. at some point in the past, you may have clicked an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of one of the messages, either intentionally or accidentally. Due to anti-spam regulations, Holliston Schools does not have to ability to re-subscribe you when this occurs, but there are steps you can follow to re-subscribe yourself. 

Moving forward, we recently received funding to purchase a new Student Information System to replace iPass. Relevant to this issue, this new system will not only have the capability to send emails directly from a Holliston Public Schools account but will also include the ability to send text alerts and conduct mass notifications via phone. This new system will be operational by August 2018. For the remainder of this school year, we will continue to rely on HPSAnnouncements and our social media pages to provide timely information to the community. Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hollistonschools or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Holliston_PS


Bradford L. Jackson, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools
Holliston Public Schools
370 Hollis Street
Holliston, MA 01746