The families of Portsmouth school students all got a call from Superintendent Susan Lusi yesterday morning, telling them school had been cancelled due to the weather, in what was the first district-wide use of a new notification system.

Fortunately, Dr. Lusi didn't have to dial 1,800 phone numbers. That was handled by the automated system the district is using, called AlertNow. Provided by Saf-T-Net of Raleigh, NC, AlertNow is a service which handles emergency notifications for schools in all 50 states, and which distributed over 50 million messages last year, according to information provided by the company. Saf-T-Net says their system can deliver phone, e-mail, and text messages at the rate of nearly 700 per second.

In a test by the Portsmouth schools earlier this month, AlertNow connected with over 90% of families by phone within minutes, with over half being picked up by people, and a third going to voicemail, according to statistics provided by the district.

"I would particularly like to recognize the work of [IT Director] Rose Muller and her team," said Lusi. "Especially since we got the system for free this year thanks to Rose writing a successful grant application."

"We were one of 10 districts that were selected," said Muller, "It is about a $6K value."

According to Muller, information about families is updated daily by an automatic feed from the district's student information system, and each of the building principals has been trained so that they can send out messages to families and staff by location.