MEMPHIS, Tenn. — For the first time Finalsite, the software company Memphis Shelby County Schools (MSCS) uses to send emergency notifications, has spoken out.
Morgan Delack, Finalsite's Chief of Staff and Communications, told ABC24 they are not to blame for MSCS' slow response, which upset many parents.
Delack mentioned that they have yet to hear from MSCS Superintendent Dr. Marie Feagins, despite making multiple attempts to reach her.
Amid this week's school threats, parents reported not receiving messages from the district alerting them about what's going on.
During a press conference on Thursday, Dr. Feagins told media outlets how many messages were not sent out to parents.
"We learned that more than 60,000 of those calls were undelivered. We learned another 80,000 if you will text messages out of more than 130,000 families if you will weren't numbers that we had were also undelivered," Feagins said.
Dr. Feagins blamed Finalsite for the failures, stating they were investigating where the issues stemmed from.
"We've had conversations with the company to figure out if it's technical difficulties, if it's something an opportunity for the company to work on, is it human error on our end or are we sending too many messages at the same time," she said.
Despite their attempts to contact the district this week, Delack clarified that the conversation Dr. Feagins referenced during the press conference on Thursday didn't happen until Friday evening.
She emphasized that the delivery issues were due to outdated contact information from the district.
"We reached out to the superintendent and wanted to talk with her about our findings, we're eager to speak with her still, we have not been able to reach her directly," Delack said. "We welcome a conversation about what went wrong."
Delack shared the information provided to Dr. Feagins via email regarding their findings on why its mass messaging system was not working. She said 47,000 recipients had no way to receive text messages by the district, 17,000 recipients had blocked district numbers, and another 32,000 did not provide email addresses. "We never want anyone to feel like they're in the dark or not engaged with what's going on in their child's school," Delack said.
Delack expressed she does empathize with both parents and MSCS. "I don't believe that anybody is trying to wrong us or vice-versa here, we wanna help them be successful," she said.
Delack reiterated that Finalsite aims to help MSCS succeed, offering them data support to improve communication and update contact information.