When he got an automated phone call from the school district just after midnight Monday, a parent of two students at Carlmont High School thought it was just a strange but isolated mistake.
Then then he got the same robo-call from the Sequoia Union High School District the following day, again right around midnight. That was perplexing, thought the parent, who asked that his name not be published.
"To me it's incredible," he said Wednesday afternoon. "Eight thousand (students') homes got called two nights in a row at midnight. There must be zombies out there. I know I'm a zombie."
District officials still aren't clear exactly how it happened, but acknowledged that the first test of a new high-tech automated phone system went very badly.
And it got the district's new superintendent scrambling to apologize.
"I am so deeply sorry that an automated call from the district went out again late last night," Superintendent Jim Lianides wrote in e-mails to parents Wednesday morning on behalf of the district, which fielded hundreds of calls. "We have been in contact with our host software vendor since early this morning trying to identify where communication broke down. ... Please accept my sincere apology for last night's call. You have my personal assurances that this will not happen again."
District officials tried to use the new system from Minnesota-based Infinite Campus to send a phone message at 3:30 p.m. Monday to alert
parents about training for a new online registration system, said district spokeswoman Bettylu Smith.
But for some reason the system started dialing every household in the 8,700-student district at midnight on Monday instead, Smith said. The district contacted the vendor, which thought it had deleted the message and resolved the issue, Smith said. But the same call went out again Tuesday at midnight.
On Wednesday, the district told Infinite Campus to shut down the automated calling feature. And the company made pinpointing the cause of the problem its "highest priority," said Kim Schroeder, Infinite Campus' director of marketing.
"We regret this error and we're trying to do everything we can so it doesn't occur again," Schroeder said.
Though the district was swamped with calls from students' parents, most were "incredibly gracious and understanding," Smith said.
Schroeder said Infinite Campus, which has been serving 1,900 districts across the country since April 2009, has never before experienced the midnight calling problem.
Besides the robo-call function, the Infinite Campus system offers the district online registration, online posting of grades and homework assignments, and a messaging function for communicating with teachers.
The Palo Alto Unified School District bought the same system from Infinite Campus and is getting ready to test the automated function next week, Director of Technology Ann Dunkin said.
"We want to find out quickly what's happened because we don't want to have this happen again in another district, and definitely not again for the poor parents of Sequoia Union," Schroeder said.

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