Text Message Policy

Pearspark is school software. When you get a text through it, your child's school wrote it and sent it — we carry it. Every text starts with the school's name, because all Pearspark texts reach your phone from a single toll-free number and your phone will show them as one conversation.

If your children attend two schools that both use Pearspark, both schools' texts arrive in that same thread.

Short, practical notices: a closure, an early pickup, a schedule change, an emergency or an all clear, and a knock on the door when a staff member has sent you a message in the family portal.

There is no schedule and no recurring send, so frequency varies by school and by what actually happens — some weeks nothing, some days more than one. Texts are plain text: no photos, no attachments, no newsletters, and no marketing of any kind.

Consent comes from you, in one of three ways:

• You tick Text me school alerts in your family portal settings and enter your mobile number.
• You tick the same box on an enrollment or registration form the school sends you.
• You reply YES to a confirmation text. When school staff enter or change your number, Pearspark texts that number to ask; nothing else is sent until you answer, and the question expires after seven days.

School staff cannot switch texting on for you. Ticking the box on their side sends you the confirmation question — it does not grant consent on your behalf.

Consent to be texted is never a condition of enrolling, of buying anything, or of using Pearspark.

Reply STOP to any Pearspark text. You can also send STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT. Your carrier confirms it, and we stop.

STOP covers every text from Pearspark to that phone — every school, every kind of message, including emergencies. Because all Pearspark texts come from one number, stopping one school stops them all. That is a limit of texting, not a choice we made, and it is the reason emergency notices also reach families by push notification, email and the portal.

To start again, text START to the same number. It has to come from the handset — no one at the school and no one here can undo a STOP for you.

Reply HELP or INFO for a reminder of who is texting you and how to reach us.

Texting is one-way. If you reply with anything other than a keyword, you get one automatic answer pointing you at the family portal, where the message lives and where you can write back to staff. To spare you a wall of identical replies, that answer comes at most once a day.

Pearspark sends no ordinary text between 9pm and 8am in the school's time zone. A message a staff member sends at 10pm waits until 8am.

Emergencies are the exception, and are sent when they happen.

A lockdown, a fire, an evacuation or an all clear goes to every phone a school holds for a family, whether or not that number opted in to ordinary texts. A fire is not a newsletter, and this is the narrow emergency-purposes exception the law allows. Drills are not emergencies and follow the ordinary rules.

A number that has replied STOP is still blocked by the carrier, in an emergency as much as any other time. We cannot override it, and we do not try.

Message and data rates may apply, according to your plan with your mobile carrier. Pearspark does not charge families anything; schools pay for the texts they send.

Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Text delivery is best effort — never rely on it alone for anything urgent.

A mobile number given for texting is used to text you and for nothing else. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it with anyone for their own marketing, and we do not share it with third parties or affiliates for marketing purposes at all.

Delivering a text requires one subprocessor — Twilio, our messaging provider, which receives the phone number and the message text and never student records. The full list is in our Privacy Policy.

Write to support@pearspark.com. For what a particular text was about, your school is the faster answer — we carry the message, they wrote it.

This policy sits alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.