Or they would have seen that there was an actual message left and called back.

That's how I tell the scammers from actual calls 95% of the time - the scammers never leave a voicemail.

I wish that were the case for me. Most calls and most resulting voicemails I receive are from scammers.

It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.

Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them at some point), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I would have a problem.

Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer.

Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well.

Basically, I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.

If someone is looking after my child, I have their number. I block calls from unknown numbers adn and some prefixes, and silence calls from numbers not in my contacts. This is pretty normal I think (because of spam).

I've only once had the problem that someone from the school used their personal mobile to call me and didn't get through, but I was already calling to let them know I'd be late.

There's no reason for parents to be able to contact you socially unless you invite it, but surely you should contact them from a school/shared number?

I'm suggesting this not for the sake of others, but for your sake. Given that people will block unknown numbers, I would think using a known number makes your life easier.

It seems odd to me than an after-school program has no set way for parents to contact the program without going through a relay-style process. I agree that the solution shouldn't be "give out your personal phone number," but it also shouldn't be "rely on a person that's not at the program to relay calls to you."

Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated) go through an intermediary that may or may not be there. That seems less than ideal, and certainly wouldn't be something that I'd be happy about if my child were in the program.

Y'know, that's a great point. I actually don't know how things look from the parent's side--I can tell you for sure they don't have my number, but "Anna"'s number must be a business phone, as I know parents always have a number they can call.

Android has the option to ring if the same number calls within 15 minutes. I find it handy at least (though my robocall level is really low compared to the tales told here).