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Health & Fitness

Is School Closed? Getting the Message Out is Serious Business!

The surprise snowstorm and extensive power outages challenged the Clarkstown Central School District's mass communication strategy.

This week’s surprise snowstorm and extensive power outages challenged the Clarkstown Central School District’s mass communication strategy, but the district met the challenge and called upon a variety of resources to do so.  Although the District has systems in place to reach the community by phone for school cancellations, to notify parents if a student is absent, and to share emergency safety information, this week was different due to the extensive power outages.  

When the decision was made to close the schools for the first day (nine of our schools and the central offices had no power), the district decided to use all phone numbers in our mass dialing system--both regular household phone numbers as well as emergency contacts--to get the word out.  As a result, more than 34,000 phones were dialed (an antiquated word; it’s as unlikely that our students have ever “dialed” a phone as it is that they have “rolled down” a car window).  Many of our community members received the call, and shared the information with others who did not have phone service.  In fact, 6,032 phones were answered, and an additional 10,247 messages were left on machines.  Of concern however were the 2,323 phones that were disconnected.  We know from prior reports that this number is unrealistically high and likely a result of phone lines being down.

In order to extend the reach and frequency of our message, an email communication was sent to 14,366 email addresses and was posted to the district’s website, the local media, and the official CCSD Twitter account, https://twitter.com/#!/ccsdschools.  

Despite the best of plans, there is no way to ensure that all stakeholders received the message, a challenge that all school districts face.  The district did not use the emergency numbers for Tuesday’s closing (many schools are still without power), but used only the traditional method, calling the phone number on file for each household.  Emergency numbers were not used for the second day of closing because it was not an emergency and those numbers are often the private phone numbers of neighbors and relatives of students, many without children in the District.

The District utilizes these many avenues of communication to maximize the likelihood that we over-communicate such important information and reduce the chance that any single point of failure will block effective communication.  Publicly sharing the above procedures will hopefully increase our ability to reach the community in such situations.  Community members are encouraged not to rely solely on phone calls or any single means of communication; if in doubt, please reach out.  Check with neighbors, the web, the media, twitter, email, or phone messages. Doing so, or sharing the message when you get it, is a service to us all!

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