This 2025-2026 school year, Olathe West administrators are encouraging the use of BAND for communication between club sponsors and members.
The BAND communication app is a messaging software that allows school clubs and teams to communicate with fellow club members and leaders. With the BAND app, organization administrators can post announcements viewable for all the members, and also send separate messages to students.
In previous years, many extracurricular groups used apps like GroupMe, which has many of the same abilities as BAND. The difference with BAND is that the organization administrators have control over many aspects of the app, like removing members, deleting content and adjusting commenting, posting and chatting permissions.
The reason for the switch is not simply due to BAND’s advantages.
“Well, then GroupMe changed it so that it was a more open ended thing so that I could be like recruited to join groups or I could be advertised to and then therefore, it wasn’t as safe of a platform.” Assistant Principal Dr. Anna-Lynn Morris said, “There were kids who were being recruited, essentially, by predators, you know, people that wanted them for clearly nefarious reasons.”
Student and teacher opinions were mixed.
“It’s a little bit different interface than GroupMe was, of course, because it’s a little more one-way in nature. But I feel like it serves our purpose,” Resource teacher Tracy Russman said.
Its different structure may be hard to adjust to, but in the long run BAND could help them organize their extracurricular activities easier.
“It was a really big change and it left a lot of clubs to like, have to reconfigure how they communicate and for my personal experience, many clubs didn’t even have a way to connect for a little bit, but BAND has been a useful tool and I like how you can do more than just do messages, where you can also do posts and schedule events and stuff, ” senior Joslyn Hasty said.
BAND is not mandatory district-wide yet, but is heavily encouraged by the district activity leaders.
“I think at some point the district is going to land on a single app that they say everyone should use. Most of the people in our building have agreed to use BAND just for consistency’s sake, but it’s definitely not required now, and I don’t know that it will,” Morris said.
Although it’s not for certain, BAND could become a big part of students’ lives, and being open and willing to learn the ropes of it could help the transition go smoothly for all clubs alike.
“If it means that we make the district happy and are able to still communicate as a group, then, you know, I think it’s a win,” Russman said.
