Brownsboro school district is implementing a new notification service which is scheduled to begin Nov. 22, officials announced.

“SchoolMessenger is a tool that we can use to do mass contacts to the home,” said parent involvement coordinator Perry Eaton. “This tool can be utilized in a multitude of ways from sending out a voice phone call to a text message to a 'tweet' to an e-mail, and the thing is, it's such a robust tool that in emergency situations, we can get information out very quickly to contact every home.”

Administrators who will have access to SchoolMessenger will be learning the equipment early next week, and Eaton expects they will be able to send out messages by Nov. 22.

“We want to let parents know what it'll do and to be expecting a phone call,” he said.

The SchoolMessenger system, from Reliance Communications, is a leading provider of ondemand notification solutions for the education market. The company is used by school districts, colleges, private schools and other institutions to keep parents, staff and students informed in both emergency and non-emergency situations.

According to their website, “the company was founded in 1999 with one focus: to ensure educators are able to quickly and easily connect with their communities in any language and at any device.”

SchoolMessenger offers different customization options for administrators, and for parents, as well.

“There's some different tweaks and bells and whistles that the tool has,Åh Eaton said. “You can narrow it down to something very specific. For instance, when they had fires (around the Lake Palestine area in August) and we had just a couple of buses that had to reroute, we had to make phone calls to the parents of the kids on those buses and tell them to pick up their students at Chandler Intermediate because we couldn't do those routes. Well, the way the tool is lined up, we could've made that phone call once and it would've just picked those parents that had kids on those routes and given them that information.”

Principals can send out messages to certain grades, certain classes or specific groups, as well as specific times to send certain alerts.

“A principal could send it out to just their campus or just to third grade. Mr. Wooten could send a message out that could be just to student council or to the parents of the student council. There's a multitude of things that can be done.”

Parents can customize what type of information they want sent and to which phone or device they want it sent to. Eaton wants parents of children in Brownsboro Independent School District to be expecting these initial alerts sometime next week, and more information will be provided to walk parents through the customization settings.

“Whenever an emergency message is sent out, they can select it be sent to their cell phone instead of the house phone,” Eaton said. “Parents can specify and customize all of these settings.”

For non-English speaking homes, the technology also has a translator.

“(Superintendent) Dr. Moran can create a message that's going to be sent out to everybody in the district, and it has an automatic translator that can translate it to Spanish for Hispanic homes. It's a very neat and robust tool. The goal was to get quicker, better information sent to the home more effectively.”

Parents and students will no longer need to flip back and forth between radio stations and television channels just to find out if school is canceled or delayed due to bad weather. If school is closed or delayed, a message will be sent out to the homes of all the students in the district as soon as the decision is made.

This tool can also be used to send “positive” news rather than just for emergency situations or school closures. It will be an addition to help keep parents more up-to-date and involved with their children's schoolwork, as well. Principals or administrators can send out an alert to parents when progress reports come out so parents can keep an eye out for that, Eaton said.

For more information, visit www.schoolmessenger.com.