In this day and age, it's not unusual to receive a scam by text message to our phones. 

Shortly after the first message was sent out by the Prairie South School Division, they posted an apology to their Facebook page to let parents know it was them.

Last week some residents received a message that seemed a little off, so at first some deleted it or assumed it was sent by a culprit. However, it was the Prairie South School Division sending out their first text with a new program, which is why the message was a little jumbled. 

"We're just in the process of rolling out a new callout system called School Messenger. We've had a callout system for ages, but we've been feeling as though it's not working as effectively as we wanted it to. So we moved over to School Messenger and they seem to have more of a refined platform," explained Tony Baldwin, Director of Education with the school division. 

"I think that's just a factor of making a change like that is when people get a strange text, their first inclination is to think 'oh, this might be something that I might not want to do anything with,' and I think it's way better that people think that way, than if they were too trusting."

Not only does this new program allow school administration to contact students' parents at one single school, but they can also send a message to all parents in the divisions in the case of an emergency.

"There's also a safety piece. From time to time we have division-wide messages if there's a significant weather event or if we have an Amber Alert in the school division or something like that. There's the need for us to communicate with parents, so School Messenger allows us to do that as well."

Baldwin wants to reassure parents that it was the school board that sent out the message, as many people believed it was a scam sent to their phones.