With One Call Now, schools improve their safety communication capabilities.
School safety is often strained during unexpected events like tornadoes, fires, floods and, occasionally, tragic occurrences that devastate communities. These types of incidents are so dangerous that the Ohio Department of Education will host a statewide tornado drill and Severe Weather Awareness Week to prepare students and school staff for emergencies.
The state’s education department also issued a statement regarding the recent shooting at Chardon High School that resulted in the deaths of three students.
“Teachers and administrators, students and parents across the state are processing the horrific events and realizing that this can happen anywhere,” the Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Stan Heffner wrote on the department’s website. “I encourage all of you to review your school safety plans and take all necessary steps to assure that you are living your plans.”
Whether a school needs to notify students, parents and staff members of early releases, class cancellations or lockdowns or provide safety tips for families, school messaging systems from One Call Now achieve all of these goals.
The service is so effective because it utilizes a system with multiple notification options. Administrators send a uniform message through voice, text and email so everyone receives the update simultaneously. Even if an emergency strikes at a moment’s notice, One Call Now is the calm during the storm.
Tens of thousands of our clients started using our message delivery/notification service when snow or rain caused activity cancellations.But this unusual weekend hammered home the fact that ‘it’s more than snow’.
-Our Boston area schools, businesses and clubs made sure to inform parents, staff and members that due to a massive water main break, their facility would or would not have drinkable water Monday.
-Financial Service Firm with offices 50 yards from the Times Square car bomb- kept their staff informed through the weekend using One Call Now.
-The US Coast Guard has been sizzling with our text messages to coordinate their response to the massive oil spill in the gulf.
Schools, fishing fleets and local governments are using One Call Now to keep citizens and workers informed and aware.
-Once-In-A-Century rains in Tennessee & Texas has prompted hundreds of thousands of calls to coordinate evacuation and sandbagging.
-Tornados in Missouri swept the state, but warning messages helped keep people safe.
When Messages Matter, We Deliver.
Are your students, families, citizens, staff and customers as safe as they can be?
When disaster strikes, how fast can you notify everyone that needs to know?
Contact us to get a system in place to send voice, text and email – securely, rapidly, to everyone.
We call everyone in minutes.
We can have you ready to protect, inform and engage those who need and trust you – within the hour.
We had fifty some odd people at our summer sales conference and company meeting this week; reviewing progress, plans and programs at One Call Now.
One of the sessions was on the impact of Web 2.0 – the new wave of user posted web content, broadly called social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs and other similar web sites where people post and read rather than the more typical Internet corporate posted information.
It turns out that even though a high tech company, we are barely above the 50% mark for employees that use social media sites. We reviewed the use of Twitter and Facebook to send messages to your group, vs using One Call Now Notification voice, SMS text and email.
The studies showed several alarming problems with using social media sites to disseminate group information. The biggest is safety; applications like Twitter allow anyone to quickly post a message, and ‘anyone’ who wishes to can login and see that message. Our concern is for the tens of thousands of youth groups we serve, that ‘anyone’ can be a predator as easily as a parent who will now be able to track and follow your kids’ activities furtively and anonymously without anyone knowing. That strikes me as dangerous.
The second biggest is reach. Although 36 million Americans login to Facebook on a regular basis, making it a popular web destination, that is still less than 11% of Americans who will see your Facebook message posted within a day or two. Facebook has less than 20% of this daily readership. This compares with 300 million phone numbers in America that we can dial to reach your group instantly.
The third problem is Push vs Pull. One Call Now pushes Messages That Matter to home phones, office phones, cell phones, and via taxt to mobile devices and via email; all simultaneously for instant message delivery. Today’s Social Media sites are more akin to a community gossip fence or town square bulletin board- requiring people to Pull by logging on and looking through a plethora of postings with no prioritization or structure.
Please give me your comments, by clicking ‘comments’ above and let me know what you think.
Safety? Security? Reach? Speed? what things are important when sending Messages That Matter?
I’m posting this news for all schools and parents… – The H1N1 virus has not gone away- but has spent the summer growing and spreading albeit in molstly mild cases. For this winter, however, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) expects a significant uptick in cases across the country.
One Call Now is pleased that hundreds of schools and districts have taken the critical step to assure they can instantly communicate with every family to calm, inform and protect them with instant voice, text and email messages with facts and assurances when needed.
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WASHINGTON – The federal government is advising schools they don’t need to close their doors this fall just because a few students come down with swine flu.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Friday that only schools with high numbers of students getting the new flu should consider closing to stem the outbreak.
The decision rests with local school officials, but they are looking to the federal government for advice about the new flu strain that has caused a global epidemic.
As the virus spread to students last spring, more than 700 schools in half the states temporarily closed their doors. The new flu is expected to hit schools again this fall. But the Obama administration is hoping to minimize closings and disruptions they cause for families.
Swine flu is expected to return when kids go back to school, and the government is hoping its new advice on when to shut down schools during an outbreak will prevent the panic and confusion that led to hundreds of school closures last spring.
The government was to issue new guidance Friday for schools to follow when swine flu strikes. Unlike regular seasonal flu, this virus has not retreated during the hot and humid summer months and so far has infected more than 1 million Americans.
“We hope no schools have to close, but realistically, some schools will close this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said this week during a forum with administration officials that was broadcast online.
The decision to close actually rests with local school officials. But those officials are looking to the federal government for advice about the new flu strain that has caused a global epidemic, or pandemic.
“I’m dealing first and foremost as a parent,” Duncan said Friday on a nationally broadcast news show. “I want to keep my children safe and keep them learning.” He said officials are asking parents to “use common sense” and encourage their children to vigorously wash their hands several times a day and take other safety precautions.
“We want to provide as much facts as we can” to local officials, he said. “Basically, this will be a tiered response. If there’s a handful of children at a school who might be sick, we want the parents to keep them home. If the numbers escalate dramatically, then we might have to close the schools.”
Duncan said officials anticipate the vaccine will be available by mid-October and that they want schools to be principal sites for getting the shots.
The administration wants to avoid the chaos of last spring, when more than 700 schools in half the states closed their doors. There are about 132,000 public and private schools in the U.S.
Students got an unexpected vacation, but many parents wound up scrambling to find child care.
School officials had been acting on advice from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which at first said schools should shut down for about two weeks if there were suspected cases of swine flu.
Then the CDC changed course, saying schools did not need to close because the virus was milder than feared. Instead, parents were told to keep sick kids home for at least a week.
Duncan said at a swine flu summit last month that closing school should be “a last resort, not a first resort.”
He said earlier this week that school districts should use common sense. “If you have one child sick, that’s one thing. If you have a whole host of children getting sick, that’s another,” Duncan said.
While this particular flu virus is new, the matter of school closings is not. Every winter, regular flu outbreaks prompt a relatively small number of schools to close for a few days because of high absenteeism among students or staff.
In addition to new guidance for when to close, the CDC and Education Department said this week they have set up a new monitoring system to track school closures across the country.
Still up in the air is whether schools will be turned into vaccine clinics, though Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has said that seems logical. “We’re seeing schools as potential partners,” she said at the forum with Duncan.
Children are on the priority list for the first doses of swine flu vaccine, but because of time needed for testing and manufacturing, inoculations can’t begin until school has been in session for more than a month; the government is aiming for Oct. 15. Many questions remain, including whether people will need one shot or two for protection. That is in addition to the regular winter flu vaccine that is also recommended for children.
States and school districts should be preparing for the possibility of mass vaccinations, federal officials have said.
They also should make plans to keep kids learning when schools do close, Duncan said.
