Contacting Staff/Students in an Emergency

[User3204]

Well.. in the current panic stricken world that is caused by this latest flu epidemic, I have been asked if there is any way that "something" could be set up so that we can contact the staff/students to tell them "the school is closed".

 

Now, the obvious thing to do is set up an email mailing/distribution list with every single staff/student in (or even two, one each). But the problem with that is, not everyone checks their email in the morning, before work (ermm.. no comment on this, ahem ).

 

 

So, does anyone have a way of contacting staff, students, parents, to tell them to PANIC! ... err.. not come into school ?

And, if so, how have you done this ?

Is this via email, text, phone ?

 

I suppose we would also want a 2nd message to say, "school open again", but this has less appeal to me. We used to have a telephone cascade, but it had never been tested, and it would fail, if people were unavailable.

 

 

I thought that there might be a company who would do this as a service, but I find nothing useful from Google.

[jcollings]

Well.. in the current panic stricken world that is caused by this latest flu epidemic, I have been asked if there is any way that "something" could be set up so that we can contact the staff/students to tell them "the school is closed".

 

Now, the obvious thing to do is set up an email mailing/distribution list with every single staff/student in (or even two, one each). But the problem with that is, not everyone checks their email in the morning, before work (ermm.. no comment on this, ahem ).

 

 

So, does anyone have a way of contacting staff, students, parents, to tell them to PANIC! ... err.. not come into school ?

And, if so, how have you done this ?

Is this via email, text, phone ?

 

I suppose we would also want a 2nd message to say, "school open again", but this has less appeal to me. We used to have a telephone cascade, but it had never been tested, and it would fail, if people were unavailable.

 

 

I thought that there might be a company who would do this as a service, but I find nothing useful from Google.

 

Something like Groupcall Groupcall - Parental Communications is what we are buying into.

[TechMonkey]

Why not have a phone tree? Lo-tech I know but it works. Head contacts SLT, SLT contact selected department heads, Department heads contact staff. As long as everyone is included then it works. Plus beyond the first decision and call the system is distributed so more resilient, especially as once one department has gotten the word they normally phone friends in other departments so it spreads virally as well. Add to that that the dept heads need to keep their phone list up to date it spreads the load rather than one person having to run around and get numbers.

[Roger]

We have used this system for 2 years now - very successfully.

 

Keep Kids Safe Communication Project – By schools for schools

 

 

Roger

[GrumbleDook]

Group Call

Keep Kids Safe

SchoolComms

 

 

There are more txt services around there too, but try and keep it to one that links in with your MIS and make sure you keep your MIS up to date after recent issues of SMS being sent to the family of a deceased child.

[crc-ict]

once one department has gotten the word they normally phone friends in other departments so it spreads virally as well.

 

Unfortunate choice of words in the current situation...

[sippo]

Local radio is the best and cheapest way to do it.

 

We also have teacher/support staff contact tree.

 

EDIT: Also on the school website.

[mossj]

Local radio is the best and cheapest way to do it.

 

We also have teacher/support staff contact tree.

 

EDIT: Also on the school website.

 

This is how we do it... And we have groupcall although its not used for that purpose.

[SteveBentley]

Anyone tried Twitter for this? Particularly now they have free SMS to vodafone back.

 

What about a dedicated RSS feed for announcing closures/re-openings?

[elsiegee40]

ParentMail will allow sending of text messages as well as email.

 

Local radio is the obvious one. The 'bad weather' passwords are equally valid for school closures for other reasons. Our most local station has it all set up so that we can register the closure and subsequent updates online, we don't even have to phone in.

 

For emergency closures, we are present doing

1) School website

2) Local Radio

3) Parent Mail

 

Someone said they used twitter in the snow a few months back. I was going to look into this.

[Sylv3r]

School website and a TXT to all parents, sixth form and staff notifying them of school closures and a follow up TXT the next day if the school is still closed or now open.

 

We send our TXT messages through schoolcomms.

[button_ripple]

Have a look at teachers2parents.

 

It is web-based, so people can access it at home. Out of all of the options I have seen it works out cheaper. We are giving it a 1 month trial here at the moment and it is absolutely fantastic!

[SteveBentley]

School website and a TXT to all parents, sixth form and staff notifying them of school closures and a follow up TXT the next day if the school is still closed or now open.

 

We send our TXT messages through schoolcomms.

 

What's your method of keeping that list of text numbers up to date?

[Sylv3r]

What's your method of keeping that list of text numbers up to date?

 

It pulls the information from SIMS. The numbers are generally kept up to date via a rolling data collection task throughout the year as well as parents more often than not contact the school if their details change.

 

We are now doing first day response via TXT messaging and the parents are really happy with it.

[laserblazer]

Why not have a phone tree? Lo-tech I know but it works. Head contacts SLT, SLT contact selected department heads, Department heads contact staff. As long as everyone is included then it works. Plus beyond the first decision and call the system is distributed so more resilient, especially as once one department has gotten the word they normally phone friends in other departments so it spreads virally as well. Add to that that the dept heads need to keep their phone list up to date it spreads the load rather than one person having to run around and get numbers.

 

We have phone trees for our kids as well. The person in the middle and end of each list phones us to say they have the received the information, so we know if a link breaks. We also have a recorded info line that I update every morning. But one flake of snow and the phones go manic!!!

[elsiegee40]

As we don't have a VLE, we are experimenting with: Office Live

 

to create shared areas that staff can place work for students in the event of them not being able to get into school. All pupils have school email addresses

[FABEnterprises]

User3204,

 

Text messaging is definately the best method of getting a message to parents quickly and directly in times of emergency/school closure as over 85% of adults in the UK own mobile phone and over 90% open/read an SMS when it's received.

 

Local radio stations and the schools website should also be a high priority and VLE if the parents are using it. Also as mentioned a recorded info line although this could get overwhelmed if all parents attempt to call all at once. A variation on this could be a dedicated SMS text in number that generates an SMS autoresponse (this is something we offer).

 

One of the other suppliers of text messaging solutions mentioned earlier has a facility to send recorded voice messages to landlines and SMS to landlines in addition to the mobile, which is a great feature and caters for the few parents that don't have a mobile phone, might be worth you taking a look at that. This is something we are looking to add in future versions of our service.

 

One other method I've heard of but I don't know how popular or effective it is, is snowday if you just google snowday you should find their site. This is another SMS text alert system that will send out the alert for you but the onus is on the parent to keep their details upto date with this site, if they change their mobile number chances are they will forget to tell this site.

 

I wouldn't rule out email totally as more are more people are able to access it on their phones so could get your message early in the morning but this shouldn't be your primary communication channel.

 

Finally you could also try the Lollipop man, true story, local school to us used roped in the lollipop man to deal with parent enquires and answer the phones when it snowed hard earlier this year. Not sure that's in his job description but good sport and worked well nonetheless.

[User3204]

Just to update people:

 

As a short term measure we have extracted from SIMS all the parents email addresses (and will be doing the same for the staff home ones), and have put them all into a mailing list. ALthough it is probably out of date, has duplicates, and some of them are definitely work based. It's been locked to just three people, the Head, the Admin Manager, and myself, as these are people I trust not use it irresponsibly.

We're going to send interim data collection sheets out to parents that have no email address listed.

 

The old system (back in 2006) was to have a telephone tree, for each class, but it hasn't been updated since. There was also one for the staff. But it always relied on people actually passing telephone numbers to eachother. This meant someone suggested a Text service, [i can do this with our mailserver, if I buy the specific add-on and a phone.. yeah right]

 

The admin staff kept saying we can call the local radio stations.. but I wonder how many people listen to these in the morning, I know I don't.

 

 

I've contacted a couple of the services mentioned above, to see on pricing, but considering I only want to use them for emergencies, they seem to cost a lot of money to have "available".

 

 

I'm hoping once we get the SIMS LG running properly, we can have a page there that the parents can click on, to confirm their details. We send out the data collection sheets annually, but I reckon there's garbage there... I've seen some of the email addresses...

 

 

If we do end up using another company to send Text messages then we will probably have to tell the parents (and staff).

[marshharrier]

Use https://www.parentmail.co.uk

 

We've been using for years - nothing bad to say about them and very cost effective.

 

Watch out for 'texting only' products like teachers2parents .... you'll end up sending tons more text messages than you should (because it's the only option) where ParentMail allows the choice of email or text. (also provides single audit trail of all communications with read/delivery receipts).

[Tim_H]

We use "Call Parents" it is another offering from the company that operates "Truancy Call".

 

See Truancy Call - Welcome

 

This integrates nicely with SIMS, but I can't comment on integration with another MIS although I'm sure they support all the major ones.

 

Basically you can mass text important information to those who need it, worked a treat when we had a school closure due to snow earlier this year.

[f21970]

We use Truancy Call/Call Parents to text/phone everybody. Obviously, it only works if everyone tells us about information changes to landline/mobile numbers!

[Tim_H]

yes - we have that problem too, but that is also the case with any method of contacting parents

[marshharrier]

ParentMail handles the 'parents changing data' problem better than most others which is why we chose them.

 

The system automatically prompts parents every term (we don't have to action this), to login & update their own details online & we get email notifications from the system as each parent changes data (ParentMail is already updated with those changes of course).

 

Works well and means we get updated contact data 3 times a year. Also means MUCH more of our messages actually get home than if we simply extracted MIS data which is only updated once a year, and even then we don't get every parent updating us!