SAD 45 improves communications

 WASHBURN, Maine – Within minutes, parents and guardians of children who attend SAD 45 schools will now be able to receive both emergency and routine messages via phone, cellular phone, pager, e-mail and personal digital assistants.
    SAD 45 began using the Honeywell Instant Alert system Feb. 26 as a way to improve communication with parents/guardians.
“I’m excited about it,” said Superintendent Brooke Clenchy. “We’ve done a couple of test runs now, and it has worked like a charm. It’s an awesome system.
“We sat down as an administrative team and asked, ‘Is there a better way of doing business?’” she said. “We didn’t want to have holes in the communication process, and this was a perfect tool for us.”
The Web-based notification service uses the same Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption protocol that protects banking sites, which ensures that all parent and school data is secure.
According to Dave Conley, operations supervisor at SAD 45, a representative for Honeywell, which also provides the district’s heating system, asked one day if officials had ever heard of Instant Alert.
“Since we hadn’t, they came up and did a presentation,” said Conley, “and we were all very impressed.”
The school does not have to install any hardware, software, or additional phone lines, keeping costs low because it is Web-based.
“For example, if there’s a school closing, we can go onto Honeywell’s Web site, type ‘SAD 45 will be getting out of school at 12:45 p.m. today because of the storm,’ and it goes direct to their call center,” he said, “and they have the capability of putting out 100,000 30-second phone calls in 15 minutes and 6,400 text messages and e-mails per minute.
“The call center sends out a computerized voice message just the way that we have it typed,” Conley said. “Should a call reach a busy signal, the system will try the call a total of eight times waiting one minute, three minutes, five minutes, and then 10 minutes between calls. On ‘no answers,’ the system will try the call a total of four times waiting 15 minutes between calls. If the call reaches a voicemail system or answering machine, it will leave a message.”
Conley said the district gave Honeywell a list of students, parents’ names and their home telephone numbers, but it was up to parents to identify how they wanted to receive their messages.
“The parent goes to this Web site, and there’s a section for them to complete a profile,” he said. “They can put in as many phone numbers or e-mail addresses that they want. It can be their home number, cell phones, the babysitter’s phone, Grammy’s phone, work … whatever.”
SAD 45 joins more than 800 other schools across the country using Instant Alert to communicate news ranging from bomb threats to bus delays. Conley said the district can now develop an unlimited number of groups for individual classes, sports teams, school bus routes, committees and parent organizations, and send customized messages to them.
“If Bus 7 were to break down,” said Conley, “we can have this set up so it will only call the parents of the kids who go on Bus 7. We can break it down by sports teams if we want. It’s a beautiful system with unlimited potential.”
Instant Alert will also allow school officials to know that their messages are reaching parents. Within minutes of initiating an alert, administrators can generate reports showing who was contacted and by what method, as well as reports that indicate who is authorized to pick up each student in case of an emergency.
“I got an e-mail recently from a parent who thought this is the best thing going and it’s going to be great,” said Conley.
Mike Taylor, vice president of marketing for Honeywell Building Solutions, said Instant Alert was “developed for emergency communications.”
“But the value of the service lies in its ability to connect schools and parents on a regular basis,” he said, “an increasingly difficult task given that parents are often on the go and hard to reach.”