The company eSchool Systems LLC, which provides e-mail school newsletters to Howard County families, is moving to improve the way parents receive emergency notifications.
Parents will be able to receive text messages about school closings or delays this winter, and recent changes to the e-mail system allow news to reach parents' inboxes more quickly.
About 36,000 families in Howard County subscribe to eSchool Systems e-mail, called eSchoolnewsletters. These free eSchoolnewsletters provide a direct line of communication from schools and the central office to parents. The eSchool newsletters contain information about PTA meetings, postponed athletic events, scholarship deadlines and other things.
Most of the time, parents do not mind reading the e-mail messages a few hours after they have been created, but eSchool Systems is adding text messaging to deliver emergency messages more quickly.
"That's the kind of messages parents want so maybe they can beat their child home or have someone pick up their child or whatever their emergency arrangements are," said Patti Caplan, the school system's public information officer.
"We know that many parents have jobs or work that take them away from their computers during the day, and if we need to, for example, close schools early for inclement weather in the winter we can text message them on their cell phones," Caplan added.
Said eSchool Systems President Douglas Parker: "We'll be testing through January, and our goal is to have [text messaging] for the next snow."
Parents can add their cell phone numbers to their eSchoolnewsletter profiles online if they would like to receive these text messages.
"They can give us their cell phone number so we can start building the database," Parker said. "We're collecting the cell phone numbers now so that when it comes time to kick off the program we can text message those people and tell them the next step for signing up."
That process will include a small monthly charge.
"People who sign up for the [text messaging] service will be charged $1.66 a month or $20 for the year to eSchool Systems," Caplan said.
The fee will offset the cost of text messaging for eSchool Systems. The eSchool newsletter is paid for by local businesses.
"The school system doesn't pay anything to eSchool Systems. Community businesses sponsor eSchool," Caplan said.
