2,100 automated calls wrongly tell Medford parents their children skipped school

By Kate Augusto, Globe Correspondent

School children may have had to do some explaining today in Medford after 2,100 automated phone calls were mistakenly made to parents saying the students missed class.

The blast of automated phone calls was accidentally sent at about 11 a.m. to parents of students of all ages. The system, which the school district has used for two years, alerts parents of their children’s attendance, emergencies, and other situations.

"It's an excellent system, this was just a sequencing error," said Roy Belson, the superintendent of schools. "We're working on correcting any possibilities of that happening again."

This was the first time the system sent out a phony batch of calls, Belson said. The exact number of parents that received a phone call could not immediately be determined because some families were called more than once.

After the initial blast, schools officials sent a second call that notified parents of the mistake. That didn’t necessarily help.

A first-grader's parent who called the Globe but would not give her name described mild chaos at schools. "It was quite a scene," the woman said. "There were parents who didn't speak English who didn't understand."

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