Schools get high-tech alert system

Have no fear of missing late school-bus warnings.
A new multi-county high-tech alert system is in place to help guide parents through this winter.
For the rest of the cold season, early risers who check on whether their children’s school buses are running on time may notice the news crawling across their television screens a little earlier than usual.
The new system is called the C.O.L.D. pilot project, which stands for Closures and Outages in Local Districts. In all, 75 school districts from Moses Lake to North Idaho signed up. The system has received praise from school officials in rural districts.
For the past 26 years, people like Shirley Hobbs, Deer Park School District transportation manager, called a woman she only knew as “Wanda,” to get the word out to broadcasters if buses were to be late.
Wanda Chatman, an Educational School District 101 office worker, was the backbone of the weather-delay warning system.
From 5 a.m. to 6 a.m., Chatman took dozens of calls from area districts at her home. She had call waiting and e-mail. Then by 6 a.m., Chatman would call the local television stations and radio stations so each could start broadcasting the information. The “Wanda” system was in place before Chatman started in 1978.
“There were a lot of schools trying to contact Wanda,” Hobbs said.
This year, ESD 101 decided to test a new information system provided by Honeywell, a company most commonly known for its ties to security and the aerospace industry.
“It’s the same process, but it’s expanded the time frame of when superintendents can call,” said Dalton Bly, ESD 101’s information technology director.
Now school officials can call before 6 a.m. They can call in the afternoon. They can call at night. Bly said television stations plan to broadcast important school closure information when they get it, which will likely come before the old 6 a.m. deadline.
At participating districts, officials call a 24-hour call center in Atlanta, Ga. Then that message is passed on simultaneously by phone recordings, e-mail, pagers and just about any communication form to officials and media outlets the districts want notified – all within five minutes.
The pilot system at ESD 101 is actually a scaled-back version. The full program allows an unlimited number of people to be contacted within five minutes.
Under the fully installed system, the phone tree is completely eliminated, said Bob Dodd, the Pacific Northwest account executive for the Honeywell-backed system.
“It gives a district the ability to communicate not only with the school system, but with all their administrators and every parent within two to five minutes of a crisis,” Dodd said. “Instead of going to the media, it can go to all the bus drivers and food service workers.”
Honeywell developed the system with school safety in mind, Dodd said.
Dodd said he offered the system as a pilot for the year here because ESD 101 is the most technologically advanced service district in the state. ESD 101 is one of nine regional educational service agencies in Washington that assist schools in numerous ways.
Later, ESD 101 will be a crucial part of presenting the same system to the state Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction, Dodd said.
After the one-year project, each district will decide whether it wants to spend the money for the system. Dodd won’t discuss prices.
Dodd said there may be grants available for school districts through the Homeland Security Department
On Monday, the system had its first official use when it warned students in the Garfield Palouse School District that buses were two hours late due to the boilers being out. By Tuesday morning, Loon Lake, LaCrosse and Steptoe school districts used the system to warn of buses running one hour late.
A record of the past 24 hours of alerts will appear online at www.esd101.net/infotech/services/ ess/cold/status/.
Chatman, the person behind the “Wanda” system, is still an office employee at ESD 101. The change is OK by her.
“It’s fine,” Chatman said. “I have plenty else to keep me busy.”