Pike County Schools Implementing Emergency Warning System
The Pike County School System has plans to soon implement a warning system that will alert parents in the event of a school emergency.
“We hope that implementation will take place within the next couple of weeks,” Superintendent Mark Bazzell said. “We’re in the process of taking the data that we have at each school and reviewing that data and cleaning up that data so we have a good starting point for an initial test.”
Bazzell said the system, called Wide Area Rapid Notification (WARN), would be useful in case of any sort of extraordinary event or circumstances.
“The main use of the system will be to provide parents, faculty, board members, law enforcement and anybody else who is registered in the system up-to-the-minute information about things occurring in the schools and emergency situations,”
Bazzell said. “We’ll be able to sort who those calls go to by school or by individual groups, because some information doesn’t need to go to everybody. It would be used for early school closings, early dismissals and late school starts due to severe weather.”
Pike County schools will be just the latest in a number of schools and universities to implement such a system, Bazzell said.
He said a number of events in recent years have heavily influenced the need for a warning system.
“A lot of schools, both universities and K-12, have gone to systems like this since 9/11,” he said. “And you hear about use of systems like this with incidents like Virginia Tech. I know, as a parent with a daughter at Auburn, I got the phone call with the recent events there from the automated system letting us know what was going on.”
The system will be capable of up to 6,000 phone calls in a minute, and Bazzell said it also can call cellular phones, send emails and text messages and send messages to AOL instant messenger.
When the system first starts, it will be a telephone-only system until the e-mail function is up and running, he said.
Also, eventually the system will be used to provide other school-related information.
“At some point, we will use this system for non-emergency messages, as well,” Bazzell said. “We will expand this service to principals so … (for example) they can call and remind people that there’s a PTO meeting next Monday night.
“Other examples of uses at the school is you can build a database of your football players and band members, and if the bus breaks down and they are going to get back at 12 instead of 10 … you can access the system and have the system call and the band parents and all the football parents. … So these kinds of uses will be of real service to parents. So we will expand on that. We don’t do that this year, but during school next year, we will do that, as well.”
Bazzell said parents with children currently enrolled will be automatically signed up for the alerts based on information on file at the schools.
He said anyone with updated contact information can call the school’s office.
The system will likely have its initial test run in the next couple of weeks, likely on a Saturday morning, Bazzell said.
Page 1 of 1 Print Version
4/9/2008 http://www.troymessenger.com/articles/2008/04/07/news/news02.prt
В