As the mother of two boys, Nirupama Mallavarupu has spent a lot of time on the road, whether dropping off or picking up kids from school and various activities. Inevitably, these trips required some form of communication with other parents. She often found that she was frustrated by not being able to contact other parents because the most recent printed version of the school directory, if it wasn’t already lost, was not going to accompany her everywhere.
To overcome this problem, she built a secure and private mobile school directory for the school, and this product evolved to include an administration platform to help schools and PTAs to manage the directory, communications, and fundraising easily. This product, MobileArq, is now being used actively by over 30,000 parents in schools across the US.
Mallavarupu says that this app is a simple convenience that will make life easier and better for parents, and that “the mission of our company, MobileArq, is to provide tools for parents to empower them and help them stay connected to their school community.”
Here’s how it works:
For the PTA, MobileArq says that the setup is easy and flexible, and can handle system data for the entire district if needed, but offers the option to enter your own information if the data cannot be gathered from the school itself. This has the potential to increase membership and engagement between parents and the association or administration as well. Quickly and easily communicating with fellow parent volunteers will save a lot of frustration and prevent the same leader from always stepping in to fill blanks in volunteer schedules. An entire classroom group can be messaged in a single click, and the school or classroom calendar can also be quickly accessed with MobileArq.
MobileArq Co-Founder/CEO/CTO Mallavarupu has over 20 years of deep technology expertise in distributed computing and web based technologies. Prior to founding MobileArq, she was the Director of Engineering at Bluenog, a venture backed company.