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“We deal with people’s most precious possession–their children. And if something happens, we have to be able to tell them what we’re doing with their children.”

– Guy Bliesner, Safety & Security Coordinator

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Challenge

Rocky Mountain Middle School serves 11,000 seventh and eighth graders in Idaho Falls, ID. The school needed a timely and accurate mass communication method in case of emergencies. It also needed to be flexible enough to send simple short messages about sports or future scheduling conflicts to specific groups.

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Solution

The school district’s Safety & Security Coordinator looked into multiple systems including e-mail and land-line calling, but ultimately decided to use SMS text.  This meant that mobile would be used for everything from announcing school closures to Parent Teacher Conference reminders.  Txtwire’s messaging service guarantees immediate communication as allowing the flexibility to communicate with specific sub groups concerning daily events. No more sloppy phone tree or mass emails that won’t be read by it’s subscriber list of over 19,000 parents, teachers, and students.

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How They Use It

1. At Parent Teacher Conferences and back-to-school nights, teachers and administrators ask parents to subscribe by visiting the school website and using an opt in widget. Rocky Mountain Middle School allows other family and community members to subscribe as well.
2. Subscribers can choose to receive only emergency information or to receive other general information. This prevents loss of subscribers to text fatigue, or when people opt-out of text lists because they receive too many updates and alerts.
3. Within the main subscribers list, smaller sub groups allow teachers and administrators to send information to only the people who need to hear it.
4. Messages are sent on the go via an administrator’s mobile phone. The sender simply addresses the message to 91011, types NM (for new message), the keyword assigned to the sub group, and then the message. The information is immediately sent to all members of that group.
5. Rocky Mountain Middle School uses SMS to inform parents of changes in sport practice times, snow days, field trips, delayed returns from school trips, half-time scores, band concerts, etc…  Administrators can also send exclusive messages to staff members such as reminders for meetings or communication during emergencies.

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Conclusion

Rocky Mountain Middle School uses Txtwire’s SMS program as the ideal solution to keep kids safe and parents informed because of it’s capabilities to provide instant communication.  Be sure to visit the link below and learn how your school can automate their communication needs into a powerful system that lets you be in control and communicate instantly.