Craig Verley

First things, first. Welcome to your new school year! Hopefully, you had a chance to breathe and do some personal recharging of the batteries during your break and the start of the new school year of work has gone well.

Now, let me add to your new school year to-do list for something that I hope you will never need to use.

The July flash flooding in the Kerrville and Hill Country regions continues to be heartbreaking. In the early days that followed, some of the discussions I observed centered on emergency notifications. This got me thinking more about school district emergency communications with parents, staff, and the community. School safety is front of mind during the start of the school year for parents, and how you plan to communicate with them should also be.

First, consider what you plan to use for those communication channels. Do they still align with where your parents and community are turning for information? Do they know where to go for information?

My big concern revolves around the use of mass calling and notification systems. These can be great tools for reaching out directly to parents and employees. However, have you looked at the reports generated afterward to see how many of those messages are getting through? For many parents, the daily call/text/email of reminders and attendance have become an annoyance that results in calls and emails being blocked or marked as spam. We all know there are some campuses or perhaps even district-level folks who have turned the mass notification system into a spam generator. That may be something to address with administrators and principals as the year starts. This is especially important if that same mass notification tool is to be used in emergency situations. A possible workaround is to take advantage of a couple of settings to have an area in your system specifically for emergencies. In this setup and possible template area, be sure to change the phone number and email address associated with the call/text/email. You can usually assign a specific phone number/ID and email address to be used as the “sender” identifier. Then, as the school year begins, you can let your parents and staff members know those identifiers as the ones that will be first response notifications in emergencies.

Be sure not to abuse the use of those identifiers. Work with principals and administrators to develop a realistic list of examples of when to use the emergency identifiers and when not to. Not every urgent situation requires an emergency alert. We all know how some of the statewide (color) alerts were pushed out to the entire state when they did not really pertain to the entire state, resulting in many people blocking or turning off those alerts entirely.

Once that system is used, then you can move on to the others on social media and the news media. Yes, we should still include our local news media early in the process as partners in emergency notifications. You know you will be getting those calls and texts anyhow, make them a part of your early notifications if you have not already.

Will all your efforts be enough? In some people’s minds, probably not, and criticisms will follow from the armchair quarterbacks. Note their concerns for possible improvement discussions later.

So, if your regular communication avenues are blocked due to abuse and/or overuse, now is the time to set up a new avenue for emergency communications. Set up a time or two during the year to send out a very clear test message. This will get you a report on where the message is not getting through. This can be due to invalid numbers and emails, to the messages being blocked. Then, if the staff is available at the campuses or district level, more personal outreach can be done to bring your contact databases up to date. The regular avenues should still be included.

The beginning of the school year may also be a good time to remind principals and other who use mass messaging systems about best practices for the system. If district administration can work with principals on a list of appropriate and inappropriate uses, that would be beneficial as well.

Here’s to a safe school year! Hopefully, your emergency communication channels won’t be needed or put to the test.