New District 885 Alert System Working Well

The Dec. 11 storm likely left some STMA adolescents grumbling, with the big snowfall-just like last year's big Christmas Eve storm-falling on a non-school day. But if it had, local students, parents and staff would no longer need to sit by the television to watch the weather scroll. Last year STMA invested in a new mass notification system which calls, emails and texts information about school emergencies, closings and other parent outreach information. The program, Connect-ED Communication Services by Blackboard Connect, Inc., said they now serve 1 in 5 public school students, and the service was successfully used during Hurricane Katrina and Ernesto, during school shootings and to help locate missing children.

"Today we are forced to prepare with emergency situations that, years ago, we never could have anticipated happening. We recognize the important role that immediate communication plays in safety as well as with ongoing parent outreach initiatives," Superintendent Dr. Marcia Ziegler said. "We selected ConnectED because of its successful track record and capability to keep parents and staff informed."

"The new technology allows us to do a mass notification to all parents in the district in five minutes or less," Wayne Hoistad, the district's technology director, explained. "The old system took considerably longer than that: up to eight hours to make a call to the whole district."

The old School Alert system required one phone line for each call that went out, and the district had 16 lines dedicated to that. Now, rather than making 16 calls at once they can use voice over internet technology to make the mass numbers of calls very rapidly. The system can make a mass call to all district parents or specify different sub-sets for targeted information.

The district officially used this system for the first time last weekend as a courtesy to the city of St. Michael, notifying all district parents that the new St. Michael City Center's events were canceled on short notice due to the snowstorm.

"We're looking forward to being able to communicate very rapidly with the parents," Hoistad said. "They see it as a good thing that the school is trying to improve communications with parents and the community in general."