PingSchool
PingSchool
Write once. Ping anytime.
Absence notes. Pickup-line reminders. Chess club on Thursdays. PingSchool turns the messages you already send over and over into one-tap buttons — or puts them on a schedule so you stop remembering them at 7:58 a.m.
Free. Sends from your own email address — no third-party “noreply.”
Built for the everyday back-and-forth between a parent and a school.
A home-screen button like ABSENT or PICKUP opens a pre-filled email — recipients, subject, body. Edit if you want, then send. You name the buttons and pick their colors.
Every Monday and Tuesday at 11:00, tell the teacher you'll be in the pickup line. An optional reminder fires 15 minutes ahead with Skip this time, Send now, or Edit.
For the reminders that are yours, not the school's. Leave for the pickup line, get up in time for the bus. Rings on the phone with a school bell, dismissal chime, or class buzzer — and sends nothing to anyone.
Mail goes out through your Gmail app password, Brevo, or any SMTP account. The school sees a normal message from you — because it is one.
Read replies without leaving the app. Inbox and Sent Mail use IMAP with the same login you already set up for sending.
Attach a doctor's note or clinic PDF, or snap a photo on the spot. Up to five files per message, 10 MB each.
Add each child with their own pronouns, then multi-select on the home screen so one email can cover both of them at once.
Join a household and your notes and your record of what the school has been told are the same on both phones. Email accounts and schedules stay private to each parent, so the office never gets two copies of the same message.
Locker codes, bus numbers, who to ask about the field trip — kept per child and never sent anywhere. Load the district calendar PDF and term dates are one tap away.
About five minutes to set up, then you mostly stop thinking about it.
Turn on 2-Step Verification for your Google account, create an App Password, and paste it into Settings. Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Brevo, and plain SMTP all work.
Name an action, choose who it goes to, and write the message once. Drop in placeholders so the details fill themselves in.
Send with one tap when something comes up, or set a weekly schedule and let PingSchool handle the recurring ones.
| Placeholder | Becomes |
|---|---|
{{child}} | Your child's name from Settings |
{{parent}} | Your name from Settings |
{{today}} | Wednesday, September 2, 2026 |
{{date}} | 2026-09-02 |
{{day}} | Wednesday |
{{reason}} | sick, dental, wellness checkup… |
{{club}} | soccer, chess, band… |
Pronouns, times, pickup and dropoff, absence spans and late arrivals have placeholders too. The app's Instructions screen lists them all, and tapping one copies it.
There is no PingSchool server in the middle of your email.
Messages go from your device to your own mail provider. They are not relayed through, stored on, or read by any PingSchool service.
Your app password or API key is kept in your phone's own storage. It is never transmitted anywhere except to your mail provider when signing in.
There's no sign-up wall, no profile, and no marketing list. Signing in is optional and everything except sharing with another parent works without it — you bring your own email account and that's the whole arrangement.
Full details in the privacy policy.
“I built PingSchool for my son, Kai, and for the everyday conversation between his parents and his school.”
It started as a way around the technological shortcomings of one school district, and turned into something that makes everyone's morning a little easier.