BVSD conducted a district wide test of its emergency notification system Wednesday afternoon, Sept. 28, 2011.
Overall, the system worked well, making calls to more than 60,000 different phones in less than an hour. In a true emergency, it will help if everyone's contact information is correct in Infinite Campus (parents) and Lawson (employees). SchoolMessenger gets all its contact information directly from those two databases.
- School staff handle updates to contact information related to student records in Infinite Campus, so any parents who need to update their phone numbers and/or email addresses for our message system should start by contacting their child's school.
- Employees may update their own contact information in the Lawson self-service portal.
Once all the contact information in the databases is correct, parents and staff can go into Contact Manager to set preferences for how they receive communications sent through the SchoolMessenger system. They can also enter a cell phone number in the SMS section of Contact Manager to start getting text messages, if they choose.
We highly recommend that people opt in for this SMS service, because the text messages deliver within a couple of minutes. It may take the system up to an hour to complete all the phone calls for staff and parents in BVSD during an emergency or weather closure. Another nice feature of SchoolMessenger’s SMS service is that parents can enter up to five different numbers on which to receive text messages, which means their students can receive these weather closure notices, too. There is no extra charge for this service beyond whatever fees one pays to his or her phone service provider for their text messaging option.
How to set up your Contact Manager account:
tutorial for parents
tutorial for employees