Bloomz has had two-way voice calling for a while, staff and families can call each other through the app without a personal number ever changing hands. What it didn’t have was the office-hours-and-voicemail layer that turns a phone line into something a front office can actually run on. That’s Staff Calling.
Matching what ParentSquare Virtual Phone already does
ParentSquare’s Virtual Phone product covers office hours and voicemail as its own offering. Staff Calling matches that baseline: a staff member sets per-day windows, tz-aware, so a school can be in-hours Monday through Thursday and closed Fridays without a workaround. Outside those hours, on a standing or timed Do Not Disturb override, or when a call simply rings out, a caller hears a greeting, translated to their language when it’s known, and leaves a recorded message.
The move Virtual Phone can’t make
Here’s the part that isn’t table stakes. Every call, every voicemail, and every transcript lands on the same CommunicationLog row a teacher’s text thread with that family already lives in. Not a separate voicemail box. Not a parallel telephony product with its own history to search. The exact same record, sitting next to whatever else Bloomz already knows about that family, including Thrive’s other signals when a district has that turned on. A point telephony product structurally can’t do this, because it has no underlying family record to write into. Bloomz does, because it’s the same student-and-family record every other module already shares.
Voicemails get transcribed automatically, through a new AI Gateway tier built on Google Speech-to-Text, chosen specifically because it reuses the exact credential pattern Bloomz’s other AI Gateway providers already use, no second cloud-storage dependency to stand up. The transcript writes back onto the call’s log entry, so a staff member scanning a call log doesn’t have to play back audio to know what a voicemail said.
A call log built for actually finding something
The log itself is paged, filterable, and searchable, the same standard every new Bloomz list view follows: filter by direction, status, date range, or a teacher’s own calls versus an admin view across a whole roster. Notes are append-only, so a “called back, left a message” note never overwrites the last person’s context. A per-number blocklist stops an unwanted caller before it ever rings through, no log entry, no push notification, nothing.
Available now, behind a flag
Staff Calling ships independent of the base voice-calling flag that already gates placing a call at all, on Bloomz Complete and above, off by default everywhere until a district turns it on. See it on the 2-Way Calling & Voice page, or talk to your success manager about enabling it this fall.