MARSHALL — A parent notification caused some confusion in the Marshall Public School district on Friday, when parents of students at Park Side Elementary were mistakenly told their children were not in school.

On Friday morning, email messages notifying parents of an absent student were inadvertently sent out at the same time as a message about the Food4Kids program, said Marshall Superintendent Scott Monson. The absence messages shouldn’t have been sent out, Monson said.

The school reached out to families as soon as the error was discovered, Monson said.

“We will work even harder to ensure this does not happen again, and I would like to apologize, on behalf of the district, to all the families who received the erroneous communication from us,” Monson said.

Marshall is not the only school district that has experienced occasional mistakes with reporting attendance. According to news media reports, over the past 10 years, different schools in places ranging from Georgia in the U.S. to Ontario, Canada have experienced glitches in automated email and phone notification systems. In some reported cases, absence reports were mistakenly sent out for a school’s entire student body, with hundreds of parents receiving emails or automated calls.