Our PTO does the emergency phone tree and it is very doable if you have everyone's cooperation. We have to use it for political problems and we just used it yesterday for a crisis.
The way ours is set up is simple, understand that we only have 90+ families so yours could be set up similar just on a larger scale.
We start with the two administrators who then call the PTO President (me) and the BOD President. We then each call six-eight team leaders who are assigned six-eight families each. Within this, we have four team leaders who are bi-lingual and are assigned families who only speak Spanish. We tell them the message from administration, for example..."School will have early dismissal today at 12:00 due to protest marches in the area." Sometimes the parents want more information and we do not have the time or the info to give them. We ask them not to contact the school, but wait for an informational email sent out by the school. This saves on time and doesn't tie up the school's phone line. If we cannot reach someone, we continue our calls and then retry the missing contact. If we still cannot reach them, that information is passed back to the school. (This is so no student will be left at an empty house. We all fill out forms designating a non-family emergency contact and the student could then be sent there.) After we have made our designated calls, we call the school to report our success and finish the loop. All of this takes about 15 minutes.
I know all the families in the school, so I am the one who sat down with administration and matched up team leaders with their contacts. We grouped them by language, by location, by friendships and so on. We run a test to check out the contact information and to make any changes necessary. We require two contact numbers...home and cell phone, knowing that we can contact the parents at work if we can't reach anyone at home.
We have used this system for the past several years and it works very well. We had to use it many times last year as the political crisis here escalated and it's a time saver. We also have a system in place called the "Out of School Emergency Phone Tree" and this is ran by the teachers in a similar fashion.
C. Brooks-Only one person has access to that information and parents know this before hand. What if a water main broke and your school flooded? How does your school handle that?
Before bad weather starts the district sends out information stating which t.v. and radio stations to tune in to. When the district makes the call to send kids home the buses roll in and kids are picked up at a timely manner. My sons pre-k year the bus was not able to come down our hill and the bus garage called me to go pick him up at a desingated area. Our PTO would not be able to handle this because all numbers need to be on hand and that would break confidentiality, only staff has access to that.
If your school has to be evacuated early due to inclement weather (or some other emergency) what is the protocol? Right now our PTO is in charge of organizing and implementing it and we are looking for alternatives.
