Faster Notification of Snow Days Comes With New Technology

This week, Hartland Consolidated Schools had its first snow day of the year Monday when icy road conditions on back roads forced the district to close for the day.

And for the first time for many parents, a phone call alerted them to the closure. According to Scott Van Epps, assistant superintendent of personnel and student services, the 2011-12 school year is the first time TeleParent, a districtwide notification system, has gone into effect.

“It was the first opportunity we had to use it for a districtwide, district closure,” Van Epps said. “I have received feedback from parents indicating that, in general, they really liked the idea that they’re being alerted to a closure, outage.” 

In Michigan, many parents with school-age children are familiar with the season of snow days and are used to waking up and checking various news sources for updates. The addition of TeleParent, however, has helped the communication between schools and parents become faster and more efficient, according to Van Epps. 

“I’m very pleased with the system and the speed in which the calls were made,” Van Epps said. “I believe that all 3,800 phone calls, or whatever, that went out to district residents — they were complete within five minutes.”

On the Hartland Patch Facebook page Monday, many parents commented on the early morning phone calls.

“It was the first time I ever got a call,” Marica Krol Petersen wrote. “I thought it was great.”

But some parents, such as Ann Gray, posted that they didn’t get a call at all.

“Is this a regular thing?” she asked.

Contact numbers are pulled from student records on file at their schools, and Van Epps said that if parents need to change their information, they should go to the school first.

“We would like to have the building contacted, and then it will come back to us,” he said. 

For parents who did receive the first districtwide notification, the call came in around 6:15 a.m., according to a post from Linda Bowen. That was considered late by some, especially for parents of older students. Van Epps said the system was not the reason, though, and he said there was no delay in outgoing calls except for the time Van Epps gave himself to double-check the information being sent out.

“The phone notification went out shortly after I received the message from Jan, (referring to Janet Sifferman, Superintendent),” he said and that verifying the safety of the roads was the reason for the late call.

“The decision to close school was made rather late in comparison to other times we closed school based on road conditions,” he said. “In general, things seemed to be pretty safe, but when the superintendent and director of operations drove the back roads, some of them were in pretty bad shape.” 

Van Epps said TeleParent is also flexible enough to be used to notify specific families at certain schools of any problems. For example, the TeleParent system was used a month ago to alert families of students at of a school closing due to problems with its water well.

School principals also have access to the new communication tool, if needed, to promote fundraisers, school events or other important information. However, the district has decided to use the system “sparingly.”

“If a phone call comes from that particular system, we do want people to be alerted that it will be something we consider to be important or of extreme relevance to them,” Van Epps said. “We don’t want to overuse it in such a way that it’s disregarded by the local community.

"We want people to understand that if we’re using it, then we’re using it for a reason," he said.