July 17, 2009
Schools have new telephone broadcast system
School cancellations.
Bus delays.
Report card notices.
It’s all important information that parents need.
The question is, “How do schools get this information to them quickly?”
This year, in the Diocese of Evansville, all the Catholic schools — with the exception of Memorial High School — will be using SchoolReach, a telephone broadcast system. Memorial currently has a contract with Connect-Ed, a similar parent contact system.
The SchoolReach program will allow a school administrator to record a brief message for delivery to an extensive, or selective, list of parents, teachers or students, simultaneously.
“Having access to this service equips schools in the Diocese of Evansville with a strong communications tool that will be used during non-emergency and urgent situations to keep the parents of our students informed in a timely manner,” said Donna Halverson, diocesan director of schools.
“We believe that the flexibility of the SchoolReach system will help strengthen the partnership between school and home.”
Once the administrator creates a message, it takes only minutes for the notification to reach parents. It replaces older forms of communication, such as phone trees and sending notes home with students, and it allows for beneficial, timely distribution of accurate and vital information.
“Schools struggle with ‘im-mediate, same day, or night-before’ notices to parents,” said Paul Langhorst, vice president of operations at GroupCast, SchoolReach’s parent company.
“SchoolReach fills this need perfectly and requires no additional hardware, software, or phone lines to operate the solution. We are very pleased that Diocese of Evansville recognizes the value of having a proactive system like SchoolReach in their communications toolkit.”