Okaloosa schools introduce new telephone notification system
Late Thursday afternoon, phones started ringing. Work phones, home phones, cell phones.
The one thing all the telephone numbers had in common was that they belonged to parents of students in the Okaloosa County School District.
When they answered, they heard a recorded message from Superintendent of Schools Alexis Tibbitts informing them of a new call notification system.
“We were kind of testing it,” said Linda Winthurst, the superintendent’s secretary. “That’s why it went out to everybody.”
In the future, the all-call system will be used to notify parents of an emergency situation, school closures or to share other information.
“Not very often,” is how frequently district officials plan to use the system, said Jerry Sansom, coordinator of high schools, health and athletics. “It would just be used very sparingly, as the need arises.”
The calls can be made district-wide, by school or even by a smaller subset. Sansom used the example of traffic delaying a particular bus route; the system can notify every parent whose child is on that bus.
The system, formally called Connect-ED, was paid for by a grant from the state.