The Mount Laurel Board of Education has voted to approve a new system to alert parents and guardians in case of an emergency.
The SchoolMessenger system can call the entire district of 4,200 students in about 15 minutes using its own phone lines, not the school district’s.
It also guarantees availability 24 hours a day, all year long.
And, it integrates with the PowerSchool Student Information System currently in use by the district — changes in one system will be made to both.
The cost is $2.75 per student, or $11,558.25 a year.
There is no cost for staff. With a click of a button, the district can call all staff members within moments in an emergency.
Mount Laurel School District Director of Communication Services Marie Reynolds said the district has been trying to bring a system like SchoolMessenger in for a few years.
“It’s going to be extremely valuable to us,” she said, noting it is “tremendous” because the district will be able to contact parents or guardians quickly.
Reynolds said SchoolMessenger is preferable to Nixle, in part because Nixle cannot be integrated with anything, and parents would have to sign up to receive notifications.
“So every piece of information that’s in our database for our students — the emergency numbers that parents wish to be called on, the emails that they wish us to use — that’s all integrated with SchoolMessenger,” she said.
Reynolds also said SchoolMessenger has “on ramps,” meaning if an emergency in the area knocks out phones, SchoolMessenger will use call centers from another part of the country.
With winter here, she said it would be very helpful to alert parents and guardians of snow-related schedule changes.
For example, Countryside school lost power for 10 minutes recently, Reynolds said. Had the power outage been prolonged, the district could have called parents and guardians.
“We need a way to contact parents,” she said. “We can’t take these babies home — they’re kindergarten through fourth-grade. We can’t take them home with nobody there.
“We need to be able to say to people ‘The power is out at the Countryside school. We’re taking all the children to the alternate location (their partner school) and you can pick them up there — or, you can call to make arrangements and we can bring the child home when you’re home,’” Reynolds added. “We need that to be in constant contact with parents.”
