SchoolMessenger Reviews

by Use Remind Instead

If I could give zero stars I would. SchoolMessenger is not conducive to a parent or a teacher’s needs. As an educator, it will not allow me to delete messages. Sending a message to families is a multi step process that can be aggravating to deal with especially if one is in a hurry. Notifications do not go through properly. (Either not at all or 12 notifications for one message) There is no way for a parent to begin a message to me through SchoolMessenger. They are forced to reply to an announcement I have made and most parents have opted out for fear of everyone seeing their replies (even though I make it private). Parents are not getting messages until a day or two later. My school district has had to send out MULTIPLE test messages in the middle of the year to ensure everyone is receiving the district’s messages. There are some serious functionality issues with SchoolMessenger. School messenger should contact Remind Me and take notes. If our district hadn’t taken on SchoolMessenger I would still be using Remind for my classroom and families. Good luck to those of you who have download this horrible app.

by GladMom20

Worked fine for a couple years and now SchoolMessenger keeps telling me messages are unread when they’ve all been read. Number of messages never gets deleted when read. Reached out to customer service on app and website with no help. Also preferences for notifications not working. Getting calls and emails when it is set to text. Really frustrating and annoying

by Jmeridth

Had to uninstall due to app continually sending push notifications even after message is read in SchoolMessenger .

by Haswain

Constantly logs me out. Recently it started constantly notifying me despite having notifications on SchoolMessenger turned off. There were no new messages it just kept randomly sending me like 10 notifications in a row a few times a day. Turned off app notifications in my phone settings. About to delete SchoolMessenger If this doesn’t work.

by Mjoecups

Last year SchoolMessenger worked well for me to receive messages from two different districts my kids are in.

This year it fails to get the password from the keychain.

Not useful

by Ambiguity123

I’m on an iPhone 11 running iOS 13.3. SchoolMessenger crashes immediately on opening. Tried several times force quitting SchoolMessenger each time.

by Mbwelch

It does it’s job of providing you with messages from your school, however there are some MAJOR issues. First, there’s no way to mark multiple messages as read, so if your school has posted 100+ messages before you signed up, you have to go through each one individually. Secondly, pick a memorable password because you’ll have to log back in every other day for some reason. Lastly, as of the past few weeks, when our school posts a message I literally get about 20-50 push notifications in a row about it. It has gotten so bad I’ve just removed SchoolMessenger .

by Forrest GB

The most useful aspect of SchoolMessenger - getting a direct notification instead of needing to listen to a call of unknown length - could be vastly improved if the message could be read in a user-friendly way. The tiny text is barely readable on even a large phone screen.

I do appreciate getting the email and voice options in one place, and I’d really like to be able to quickly scan the text.

Devs, please try reading a message in app - while it’s possible to zoom in, the usability for reading a whole page is atrocious. I usually give up a scrolling side to side and just leave SchoolMessenger to load the email.

Supporting viewing in landscape mode would fix this easily! You could also support Dynamic Type. I see this has been reported to the developers for *years*, and it wouldn’t take a lot to make this much more user-friendly.

by Anslowp1

I get about five push notifications for every actual message from my school district. A little ridiculous...

by GRWyse

When you are in a messaging conversation with one or more people, SchoolMessenger takes you to the beginning of a conversation instead of taking you to the most recent message forcing you to scroll and scroll until you get to the most recent message. The authors of SchoolMessenger must not text and know how nice that feature would be.

by SML4Q

Have to re login almost EVERY time! Duplicates messages I get texted to me! And to top it off, it doesn’t flag messages as read after reading them causing me to constantly check since SchoolMessenger icon shows the number of “unread” messages!

by Connor66666

Amazing app awesome at getting messages from the school on time

by Bjf In Cfjjchc

We didn’t have this when I was growing up. I gotta love it! they can’t get away with nothing anymore. Ha

by Deub12345678983838392@29

I’d like to point out that you really have to download SchoolMessenger if your child’s school uses it, if for no other reason than because on the screenshots in the iOS store the teachers name is Krabapple....also it works really well.

by Norapd

I like SchoolMessenger. Great way to have all my kids school in 1 app and be connected. I truly like this.

by Ninja_Nina_

With everything going on right now, SchoolMessenger keeps us informed! Our school, community and safety are most important!

by Jessicacaldarera

Easy to use and understand I love the voice messages that we get from the teachers will see how good it is once school starts

by Sarii Joy

Thanks for so such amazing app!! My #1 priority is to be in touch with my kids schools specially on this new school year having a transition to online schooling. After looking around SchoolMessenger , I found out its really easy to keep in touch with all the messages. I highly recommended!

by Kizzylay

School emails are separate for all of my other emails, therefore we no longer miss any emails from the school. I recommend SchoolMessenger to everyone.

by R&BHoffman

SchoolMessenger makes it super easy to give & receive information from my students school! Great tool for sharing information... Betty

by AshleyMF8708

SchoolMessenger had the potential to be great but currently it falls way short. There is no way to switch between children if you have multiple. There are multiple spots for messages all with the same message but no way to know what child the teacher is referencing. SchoolMessenger doesn’t stay logged in and the formatting is obviously not meant for a phone. Please fix this if you are going to market it to schools for a communication tool.

by Devin <3

SchoolMessenger has so many issues. It’s irritating that my school district chose it as our means of communication with parents.
1. It’s cute that parents can ❤️ a message but there is no way to find out who it is that liked it.
2. I can only send one picture at a time and half the parents can’t download it.
3. When I send out a group message and a parent comments, I can’t comment back to them directly. The whole group can see my message. It makes me look dumb. Instead I have to go back try and find that parent and remember what they asked and respond separately.
There definitely has to be a better way to do all this. Too many bugs to list. It is awful. 😡 I hope they can fix all this or my district can find an app that is easy, convenient, and actually WORKS!

by Steens2

After getting my colleagues and classroom parents all pumped up about using SchoolMessenger, I could not be more disappointed with the outcome. Currently, my school has the largest amount of participants signed on district-wide (85%). All I keep hearing is that School Messenger is ineffective. When I’ve asked why, here’s what I’ve heard:
1. It’s super laggy (slow).
2. It won’t allow me to post pictures/files.
3. It’s slow to load.
4. The font is really small with no ability to enlarge font size.
5. It only orients portrait on my iOS devices. (A landscape option would be nice).
6. My parents are complaining of not receiving my messages.
7. My parents are complaining of having text messages forwarded to inactive landlines. When they’ve attempted to update the account with current phone numbers, SchoolMessenger won’t allow them to.
8. Another parent complained of receiving messages in a language not spoken at home.

All in all, the parents and staff at my school are preferring to use Remind or Class Dojo over School Messenger. If things don’t change fast, you’re going to lose your clientele.

by Zerofreetime

My district has decided this is to be our primary means of communication between parents/students/teachers. It is absolutely disgraceful. During parent conferences, after finding out some parents weren’t using SchoolMessenger for various “lousy app” related reasons, we tried to open SchoolMessenger and “sell” the parent on it and the darn thing wouldn’t even open. We waited at least 30 minutes to no avail! Talk about embarrassing!! We’ve decided to go back to good old email!!

by Enrique626

This is going to be the 2nd year that my school site uses this website/app. Last year, parents and students were not really able to join the groups. I was literally with parents, making sure they used the same email that the school had on file for them.

SchoolMessenger is great, as far as receiving mass messages from admin. But everything else, communicating with parents/students doesn’t work. This is why practically all the teachers at our site stopped using this. Hopefully it’s fixed for this upcoming school year. But by looking at their update history, it seems highly unlikely.

by Mom32013

Lots of potential, and helpful to have an app for school communication, but some problems that make SchoolMessenger not very fun to use:

- Can't delete messages - a side-swipe just opens the message.
- Can't scroll up or down on messages feed - hope you don't access to anything earlier than the 8 most recent messages!
- Message format feels like iOS circa 2008 - just an email formatted (poorly) into a phone app.
- Even when zooming in by clicking the very small plus-button, text size is small
- When entering SchoolMessenger via lock screen notification, it often takes you to the sign-in screen, sometimes even making you sign back into SchoolMessenger .
- No 3D Touch capability (naturally)

Overall it feels like someone wrote this who hasn't used iOS except to write SchoolMessenger. If I were an administrator who didn't want to agitate parents, I would steer clear of this one until they make this parent app less cumbersome for the end-user.

by Dncngrabit

My school district chose School Messenger as our primary communication system between teachers and parents. I can access all parts off the computer, but SchoolMessenger has crashed every single time I’ve tried to use it on my phone (iPhone X). They’ve communicated with the district, who’s communicated with us, that they are working on fixing the known issues. However, it’s September...we started school August 6. I hope it gets fixed soon since this is our point of communication.

by Resortstar

1. I have to log in every single time I open SchoolMessenger to view messages from teachers. This is extremely frustrating.

2. You cannot send a private message to your child’s teacher. You also have to constantly worry that your messages can be viewed by other parents if you reply to your child’s teacher.

3. It’s constantly showing messages as unread.

4. There is nothing that tells you who can view a “public” message. There seems to be no difference between public messages and private ones.

5. Class Dojo offers several user friendly features that would make this school messenger app better.

Hopefully SchoolMessenger gets updated and made less frustrating to use.

by JRMlaw

SchoolMessenger is barely useable. It gets two stars for being a gateway for me to set communication preferences with my daughter's school district, but that's all. Alerts go off repeatedly (just got five in a row for one new message), and messages cannot realistically be viewed in SchoolMessenger (there's only a small viewing window, and text in that window cannot be resized, so you get a small window with a big-text message you need to slide around to actually read). I will be strongly encouraging my district to find another app for parent-notifications and -communications.

by Jrt0111

It’s irritating that I have to log in every time I want to read a message from my school district. SchoolMessenger will not remember my password and I cannot find a setting to change this. It also won’t allow me to delete an old phone number that my wife used to have but doesn’t any more. Finally, it won’t remove the notification icon even though I have read all my messages. It says I still have two unread messages.

by Poplol111

SchoolMessenger is okay. When you look at a message, the top tells you the initials of the student the message is relevant to. It really needs to be set up so that SchoolMessenger doesn’t log out. It’s ridiculous having to log in each and every time a message is sent.

by APGthree

App works.

1) I wish you could mark all the notifications as read vs going into each one.
2) Easier notification navigation. When you click and open a notification there should be an option to go to the next one or the one before vs having to back out and click on the next one.

by 4Schlteacher

I just downloaded SchoolMessenger. Had hoped for a little more within SchoolMessenger . Example: We use School Messenger at the school I work for, my kid's school also uses School Messenger. The email addresses in those systems are not the same. It appears as if you have to log out of one account (email address) and then log in as another account (different email address). The ability to kink multiple email address or school systems to a single account would make SchoolMessenger easier to use.

It is new, so I expect this will be a common suggestion and change in a future version.

by Unc_tarheels_23

Really enjoy having SchoolMessenger and what it lets me do! Reviewing old messages, setting my own preferences as well as being able to speak with teachers makes life so much easier!

by Lisa C Ferguson

SchoolMessenger is amazing! Thanks Mrs. Frazier for all your help!