Ponca City Schools to test phone system Monday

With winter weather here, the Ponca City Public School District will be testing their automated student notification calling system on Monday, November 24, 2014. The test call is scheduled for Monday evening from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. All Ponca City Public School parents/guardians will receive a phone call with a recorded message that evening.

The notification system is used to communicate important announcements to staff, students, parents and families in the event of inclement weather, emergency notification, important announcements, surveys, or other uses as needed. The district will continue to report school closings due to snow or other weather conditions on local radio and television stations, district website and Facebook page, and will use this system as an overlay to the public announcements.

New Feature This Year
The district has a new feature available this year through Blackboard MyConnect site that allows people to sign up for school notifications. It requires the user to sign up and choose a school but it won’t be linked to a student. This will be for extra contacts that are not already included in the student database system. This new site will enable parents, staff, and community members to manage their contact information and give them the option of installing the Blackboard MyConnect app for Android and iOS to receive push notifications for the messages that are important to them. The website URL for enrollment is: https://PoncaCityPublicSchools.bbcportal.com.

For this service and for many other reasons, it is more important than ever that each child’s school has the most up-to-date contact information for his/her family. If parents have not contacted the school about a changed or new telephone number, they need to do so immediately. If parents do NOT receive a phone call, they need to notify their child’s school secretary as soon as possible to update their contact information.

Caller ID’s will display one of Ponca City Public Schools Central Administration numbers 580-767-8000-8008. The system delivers the message to both live answer and answering machines. No-answers and busy signals are automatically retried several times after the initial call. It does not duplicate numbers, so parents should not get multiple phone calls if they have children on the same calling list. The system will note if the call was answered by a person or an answering machine. The district can immediately see which phone numbers have been reached by telephone and which have received messages.

This service requires no registration by employees, students or parents. The numbers called will be the numbers, both mobile and home, that have already been provided to the school at enrollment. All information and contact numbers are strictly secure and confidential and will be used only for this purpose.