Today one of our upperclassmen was given a detention for violating one of our policies. For various reasons the student will not be serving the detention until next Tuesday (I am writing this on a Thursday). The assistant principal assigning the detention asked the student if he would like him to send him a text reminder Monday night about the detention on Tuesday. The student obliged and gave the assistant principal his cell phone number and mobile carrier.  The student left the office thinking what a great guy the assistant principal was because he is going to send the student a text message next Monday night reminding him of his detention the next day. What the student does not know is that we are using a a service called Text Memos to set up text reminders. The service is free and allows you to send text messages to anyone's cell phone. You pick the date and time and what you want to say and it will send it to the person's cell phone as a text message. It takes about a minute to set up the reminder.

We are trying this out this year because we have found that when there is some time between the assigning of a detention and the serving of the detention students tend to forget they have detention. When this happens it counts as a cut and the student is assigned an extended detention. This is not a situation that occurs frequently but happens for example if on Thursday we deal with a student and decide to assign a detention but we may not have detentions on that particular Friday. This means the student has to wait until Monday to serve the detention. This week it is even worse because we have no school on Monday. We will see how it works.