Yesterday’s public roll-out of the list of 20 schools that D.C. School Chanceller Kaya Henderson would like to see closed was about as good as it could be: DCPS launched a website containing the full list of schools and justification for their closing, recorded a YouTube video of Henderson explaining the move and largely kept the list from leaking to the press and public too far ahead of time.

One thing didn’t going as planned, though. An automated phone call to parents at affected schools containing a brief message from Henderson (the audio is here) was mistakenly converted to text-to-speech, making Henderson sound less like herself and much more like a robot.

The Post’s Dan Steinberg received one of the phone calls, as did a Greater Greater Washington commenter, who said: “Why does Chancellor Kaya Henderson sound like a robot in the call I just got re: school closings? DCPS is taking the robocall to a whole new level.”

One DCPS parent we spoke to received the call, but at first chalked it up to just another school-related robocall. “I didn’t recognize it as her at first the voice was so odd, but we get those literal robocalls with the robot voice occasionally from my kids’ schools anyway,” said the parent, who asked not to be named.

School officials were quick to own up to the mistake, saying it was a “technical error.” They also admitted that robot Henderson may have been a little frightening, tweeting: “We sincerely apologize for the error and frankly, scary robot voice.”

That explanation was good enough for the DCPS parent we spoke to: “It was nice to have an honest, poking-a-little-fun-at-themselves response from DCPS, though,” they said.

Filed Under: closings, d.c. public schools, dcps, kaya henderson, robocall, robot, school closures, schools,