Set up attendance alerts for parents (email, SMS, instant or digest)

MarkTrack can tell a family that their child was marked absent — by email, by text, or both — and it can tell your admins that a family filed an absence request. All of it lives in one place: Settings → Attendance. This guide walks the three notification cards on that tab: Parent & student attendance alerts (email and push, configured per school), SMS Alerts (texts, configured once for the whole organization), and Absence Requests (who on your staff hears about new requests). It also explains what each delivery mode actually sends, and when.

Step 1 — Open the Attendance settings for the right school

1. Go to Settings and open the Attendance tab.
2. Check the school in the school switcher first. The alerts card is titled "Email alerts for [school name]" — every school has its own delivery mode, its own trigger statuses, and its own recipients. Switch schools and configure each one.
3. You need admin (or settings-edit) permission. If the card says "Select a school from the switcher to configure its parent & student attendance alerts," you're in an org-wide view — pick a school and come back.

Step 2 — Choose a delivery mode

The Delivery mode radios decide whether — and how — families hear about a mark:

• Off — nothing is sent. This is the default.
• Daily digest — a next-day email sent at the Digest send time you set, covering the previous day's marks. Each recipient gets one email per student per status, with the student's recent attendance rate included; a student absent in six classes on the same day still produces a single email.
• Instant — a real-time email as soon as a mark settles (see the settle window below), plus an in-app notification and a phone push for anyone using the MarkTrack app.
• Both — instant alerts and the daily digest.

Step 3 — Pick which marks trigger an alert

Under Which marks trigger an alert, tick the statuses worth an email:

• Absent (student did not attend)
• Tardy (student arrived late)
• Excused absence (absence was excused)
• Excused tardy (late arrival was excused)

Present is never alertable — there is no toggle for it, and a mark that ends up Present sends nothing. At least one status must stay ticked; saving with all four cleared is refused with "At least one attendance status must be selected for alerts."

Step 4 — Choose who gets alerted

Three independent toggles under Who gets alerted:

• Parent — the student's primary parent.
• Secondary parent — only when a second parent is on the student's record.
• Student — only when the student has their own login and email. A no-login child account has no inbox and is skipped, so ticking this changes nothing for younger students.

Step 5 — Set the timing, then save

The timing fields appear based on the mode you picked: Settle window shows for Instant and Both, Digest send time shows for Daily digest and Both.

• Settle window (minutes) — how long MarkTrack waits for a mark to stop changing before it emails anyone. Default 10, allowed range 1–120 (anything outside is pulled back to the nearest limit). If a teacher mis-taps Absent and fixes it to Present inside the window, the alert is cancelled and the family never hears about it.
• Digest send time — the hour the summary goes out, in your organization's timezone. The digest covers the previous day, so a morning time reads naturally to parents. If your timezone is wrong, the digest fires at the wrong hour.

Click Save alert settings. You'll see "Attendance alert settings updated successfully."

Step 6 — Add text messages (optional)

Below the email card, admins get SMS Alerts. Texts go out when a teacher or admin marks a student absent — tardy and excused marks never text — and only to students who have a parent with a phone number on file.

1. Notification Channel — Email only (no texts), SMS only, or Email + SMS. Picking either SMS option switches the alert pipeline on for you.
2. SMS Grace Period — minutes to wait before the text is sent, 0–240, default 30. If the mark is corrected to Present or Tardy in the meantime, the queued text is cancelled and never sends.
3. Who gets the text — Parent(s) only, Student only (needs their own phone number), or Parent + student.
4. When to send — After marking absent counts the grace period from the moment of the mark (set grace to 0 to text immediately); After class ends counts it from the class's scheduled end time. A class with no end time on file falls back to 2 hours after the mark.
5. Click Save SMS Alert Settings.

Step 7 — Route absence-request notifications

The last card, Absence Requests, is per school and covers the family-request flow rather than attendance marks.

• Review acknowledgment and Academic responsibility acknowledgment — the two statements a family must tick before a request can be submitted. Edit the wording to match your policy; both are required, so they can't be left blank.
• Who gets notified — tick the admins who should receive new-request emails and in-app notifications for this school. Leave every box unchecked to notify every admin who can see this school (super admins, admins linked to it, and admins with no school restriction). An admin restricted to a different school is never included.
• Remind admins daily about requests pending more than 48 hours — one summary email per school per day listing everything still sitting in the queue, sent to the same recipients.

Click Save Absence Request Settings.

What each side actually receives

• Families — the attendance-mark email (instant, digest, or both), the matching in-app/push notification when the school is on Instant or Both, and an absence-request text if SMS is on.
• A family who files an absence request — a submission receipt straight away, then an approval or rejection email when an admin decides. These are separate from the alerts above and always go out.
• Admins — new-request notifications per the recipient list, plus the optional 48-hour reminder.
• Teachers — a morning in-app/push heads-up when students in their classes have an approved absence for the day. No email, and nothing to configure.

Troubleshooting

• Nobody got an email. Check the delivery mode isn't Off, the marked status is ticked under "Which marks trigger an alert," and at least one recipient toggle is on. Then confirm the mark was made by a teacher or admin, not a self-marking student.
• Only one school is sending. Delivery mode is per school — switch schools in the switcher and configure the others.
• The digest arrives at a strange hour. The send time follows your organization's timezone; fix that first.
• A parent got no text. They need a phone number on file, SMS must be enabled for the organization, and only Absent triggers a text. A mark corrected inside the grace period cancels the text on purpose.
• You marked the whole class present after a wrong absence. That's fine — flipping a student back to Present inside the settle or grace window cancels the queued email and the queued text. Demo-seeded data never notifies anyone at all.

Next: see how the marks that trigger these alerts get made in take daily attendance, review the family side in absence requests, or browse the other guides in Attendance.