St.Anthony's Italian Festival!

Bad weather Closing Info

SchoolReach is a telephone broadcast system that enables our school personnel to notify all households and parents by phone within minutes of an emergency or unplanned event that causes early dismissal, school cancellation or late start.  The service may also be used from time-to-time to communicate general announcements or reminders. This service is provided by SchoolReach, which specializes in school-to-parent communications

When used, the service will simultaneously call all listed phone numbers in our parent contact list and will deliver a recorded message from Ms. O'Donnell or another school administrator. The service will deliver the message to both live answer and answering machines. No answers and busies will be automatically retried twice in 15 minute intervals after the initial call

IMPORTANT

1. Only your primary telephone number on record is currently registered in the system.  Please verify this number by loging to the SchoolReach contacts management page .  Any changes you may may not take effect for up to 2 weeks.  From time-to-time, we may also send a broadcast message via e-mail, your e-mail address can also be entered on this on-line form.

2. If you wish to be contacted simultaneously on other telephone numbers when a broadcast message is sent, please enter that information in the SchoolReach contacts management page.  The system is able to handle up to support up to 2 additional phone numbers.

NOTE:  All information and contact numbers are strictly secure and confidential and are only used for the purposes described herein.

Here is some specific information you should know.

·         Caller ID.                          The Call ID will display the main number for St. Anthony's Grade School

·         Live Answers:                   There is a short pause at the beginning of the message, usually just a few seconds. Answer your phone as you normally would “Hello” and hold for the message to begin. Multiple “Hello’s” will delay message. Inform all family members of this process who may answer your phone.

·         Answering Machines:       The system will detect that your machine has answered and will play the recording to your machine. The maximum numbers of rings before hang up is 5. Make sure your machine answers after 4 rings or you may miss the message.

·         Morning & Day Calls:       All broadcast messages will be sent only to home phone numbers.  We will announce shortly how to provide you cellular telephone numbers so that calls can be sent to cellular telephones as well.

·         Message Repeat:               At the end of the message you will be prompted to ‘press one’ to hear the message again.    This is very useful when a child answers the phone and hands it to a parent, who can then ‘Repeat’ the message in its entirety.   

·         Emails: This option exists for our school, we will announce shortly how to provide a e-mail address so that broadcast messages can be sent to your e-mail address

If you have any questions, please contact Steve Achenbach or the School office staff.

SchoolReach, the service provider, uses the best available technology in the industry to detect the difference between human answer and machine answer.

How detection works:

1.      The system detects and measures the voice energy when the phone is answered.

2.      The system measures this energy in combination with the background noise and line impairments.

3.      If the system determines that it is a “live” answer it will immediately start playing the message.

4.      If the system determines that it is a machine it will wait for 3 full seconds of silence before playing the message with a maximum wait time of 20 seconds.

5.      If the system cannot make a determination it will default to answering machine thus requiring three seconds of silence for the message to play. In this case, you may here a prompt to “Press any key to here the message immediately.”

Some reasons for false detection:

1.      Loud background noise; television, radio, general noisy environment.

2.      Cordless phone that has static or other foreign noise.

3.      Not saying hello or delaying saying hello.

What can be done to remedy this?

1.      Do not say hello more then once, if the system detected your answer incorrectly all noise will reset the three-second counter.

2.      If, after you answer, the message does not immediately play- you can cover the mouthpiece of the phone to cutout all background noise the message should then play after three seconds.