School officials seek to install an automated notification system

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – When it snows, Principal Billy Miller must call the homes of 1,100 students who attend Holston Elementary and Holston Middle schools, to let their parents know whether classes have been canceled or delayed.

“All I need is a computer and a telephone,” Miller, principal at Holston Middle School, said Friday as he demonstrated the “SchoolConnects” parental notification system his school has had for the past three years.

The system provides an automated dialer that delivers the same recorded message to each telephone number on the list. And it can be expanded so it calls parents’ work or cell phones in addition to home phones. It also can send text messages, e-mails and pages to any person whose contact information is programmed into its database.

Because of those last few capabilities, Sullivan County school officials are working to install the parental notification system at each one of the county’s 27 schools.

Setting up the program, which costs about $28,000, is the school system’s latest response to concerns generated by an armed intruder’s visit to a local high school.

On Aug. 30, a team of sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Thomas Richard Cowan, 62, of Kingsport, before he could act on threats to harm students and school personnel with one of the two handguns he brought with him into Sullivan Central High School.

During the chaos, Director of Schools Jubal Yennie said, school officials relied on the news media to let parents know what was happening, that the school’s classes were letting out early and where parents could pick up their children.

The school system also tried reaching parents by making posts to its website, Facebook page and Twitter accounts – three methods of communication that Yennie admitted might not have reached every parent in the most efficient manner.

That’s why he pledged to install a new parental notification system at every school.

Yennie said he wants a system that has the same capabilities as the one he used while working for the Williamson County School System in Franklin, Tenn. He also drew some inspiration from the parental notification system that Miller and the principals at Sullivan Middle School in Kingsport and Holston Valley Middle School in Bristol have been using to keep in touch with parents.

Managed by Synrevoice Technologies Inc., a Canadian telecommunications company, the SchoolConnects system dials any phone number its users program into a database, leaves a quick recorded message, and records if and when that message was received.

“Parents really like it at report card time,” Miller said, adding that some students would rather not let their parents know when report cards are being sent home. “They’ve never complained about getting information, they love being informed.”

In addition to letting his parents know about inclement weather and when report cards are heading home, Miller said, he’s used the SchoolConnects system to inform parents when a team’s practice has been canceled and if their student has been chosen to serve in a special academic club or honor organization.

Using SchoolConnects costs the county $2.50 a student each year, Miller said. It sends messages out to any group of parents – from those whose children are on the football team to every parent in the school.

Yennie said he plans to discuss how he’ll get the system set up at every school in the county when he has his next principal’s meeting later this week and hopes to start installing the units at the schools by the end of the month.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to get this thing rolling before the snow flies,” Yennie said, hinting at the one thing he expects to be calling parents about the most this winter.

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518