District To Test Student Notification System

With winter weather here, the Ponca City Public School District will be testing its automated student notification calling system on Monday. The test call is scheduled for Monday evening from 7– 9. 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.

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 IDs 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.