Preparing for the Worst

District administrators must be braced for any type of crisis

• By Karla Lemmon
• Oct 01, 2008

From severe weather to acts of violence, schools across the nation are forced to deal with a variety of emergencies. As a result, districts and administrators have become well versed in crisis planning.

One basic element of an emergency plan is communication— knowing how to get the right information to the right people at the right time. It sounds simple, but it’s an increasingly difficult task given today’s on-the-go lifestyles and the variety of technology people use to keep in touch. Placing an emergency call to a home phone is just not as effective as it used to be.

Consequently, administrators are turning to mass notification technology like Honeywell Instant Alert® for Schools. Used by more than 1,800 schools across the nation, Instant Alert quickly delivers vital information to parents, teachers and staff. The Web-based notification system broadcasts messages to any communication device—landlines, cell phones, pagers, e-mail and PDAs. And it can send 150,000 30-second phone calls in 15 minutes and 6,400 text messages per minute. This ensures people receive timely, accurate information in an emergency and helps schools focus resources on managing the situation, not the phone lines.

“School districts are realizing the need to use modern technology to get parents the correct information quickly and accurately,” said Donna Matthews, director of technology and assessment at Amelia County, Va., Public Schools. “With Instant Alert, all parents receive information from a credible source.”

Old Methods in a New Era
The tools school districts traditionally use to communicate with parents, including phone trees and printed fliers, are proving to be inefficient. Phone trees eat up valuable staff time and district resources, and fliers don’t always make it home. School administrators are even running into problems with the most common method of emergency communication—local media outlets.

“It can be frustrating to get the media to report the necessary information,” said Jack Fallat, assistant head of the Annie Wright School in Tacoma, Wash. “Phone lines are often busy, and traffic jams occur on media Web sites.”

That’s why mass notification technology has started to gain traction. It’s fast, effective and direct. Kim Owens, an administrative assistant for the Shelbyville Central School District in Indiana, said Instant Alert was an instrumental resource in a string of recent emergencies.

One evening, winter weather conditions caused the district to announce a delay for the following morning. The morning of the delay, a fire broke out at a fiberglass plant near the elementary school.

“When smoke was found in the building, we decided to close the school,” Owens said. “After we announced the delayed start, parents weren’t expecting the school to be closed. So we had to get the message to them quickly, before they sent their children to the bus stop.”

Across town, as the middle and high school students were arriving at school, administrators discovered there was a limited water supply, as well as a boil-water advisory, due to the fire. The staff blocked off drinking fountains and made alternative lunch plans to accommodate the advisory and hold classes as scheduled.

“When we discovered the toilets weren’t flushing, we decided to inform parents and send the students home,” Owens said. “Without Instant Alert, we couldn’t have done what we did.”

A Rumor's Worst Nightmare
Bomb threats are notorious for disrupting a school’s normal ebb and flow. While almost all threats are false alarms, district administrators must take each one seriously.

When a note with a bomb threat was found at an Amelia County school, administrators were able to reduce anxiety levels immediately.

“As soon as we received the threat, we evacuated students and, to minimize panic, sent notification messages to parents and staff,” Matthews said. “When we heard it was a false alarm, we sent parents an all-clear message and resumed school.”

John Searles, superintendent of Merrill Community Schools in Merrill, Mich., used Instant Alert after school one day with important news that couldn’t wait until morning. A man who claimed to be a police officer approached a Merrill student walking home from school. He asked to search the student’s backpack, looked at her papers and told her to head home. Once the girl was home, she informed her parents and they quickly figured out the man was an impersonator. The school received a call shortly thereafter.

“We immediately sent a message to parents informing them of the incident, and we asked that they talk to their children about strangers and safety,” Searles said. “We were able to leverage Instant Alert to make sure parents received accurate information, void of any misinterpretation.”

Providing precise, consistent and timely information is especially important for parents who may not see their students on a daily basis—like those with boarding students at Annie Wright School, a pre-kindergarten through 12th grade day and resident school.

Fallat said Instant Alert helped prevent rumors and reduce panic for parents regarding a student who died at school due to a medical condition. Determined to keep the focus on the loss, the school used Instant Alert’s recorded voice feature to communicate directly with parents about what caused the student’s death and assure them everyone else was safe.

The Best Outcome
Increasingly active lives and a heightened sensitivity to safety concerns are changing the way schools need to interact with parents, guardians and employees. Instant Alert is a comprehensive service that takes the guesswork out of school-to-parent communication and streamlines the process of delivering important information.

“When an emergency does happen, parents want to know what is going on right away,” said David Adams, superintendent of Shelbyville Central Schools. “We’ve found a way to calm the situation by communicating with parents quickly, which allows us to focus on resolving the emergency.”