The Knox County Public Schools will be increasing their parent notification methods on Friday after testing the telephone notification system being utilized in the district.
The system, One Call Now, is used to automatically deliver telephone messages to the households of students. The system will be used to deliver messages regarding upcoming events, school closings, delays, and other school and district announcements.
The system will be tested Friday afternoon, November 4, when the district will send an automated phone call to all student telephone numbers in its database.
“We want to notify the community that you may receive a phone call from us on Friday afternoon”, stated Frank Shelton, public relations director for the district.
“As people move and change phone numbers, it’s possible that telephone numbers will be called that do not have any children in the Knox County Schools”, said Shelton. “If you do not have children enrolled, you will be able to opt-out of the callings by following the voice prompts at the end of the message.”
The district encourages all parents and guardians to have an active telephone number in the database so they can be quickly notified by the district.
Telephone messages regarding school cancellations and delays will be sent before 9pm or after 6am depending on when the decision is made. Other messages will be delivered throughout the day and emergency messages may be sent at any time.
“A few of our schools have already fully implemented One Call by setting up automated recordings to notify parents that their child was absent and to notify of upcoming events.”
An advantage of the One Call system is that it will reduce any miscommunication that parents and guardians might receive from individuals not connected with the school system.
“Each winter we have speculation of school closings and delays that quickly spread as being true, and we have parents that don’t receive information on which bus routes are being avoided when we operate on plan B”, stated Shelton.
“The telephone notification system will allow parents to directly receive complete, detailed, announcements from us.”
Parents and guardians that do not receive the automated message on Friday may contact their child’s school to verify their telephone number and add secondary phone numbers to the notification system.