LOS ANGELES USD TRIES OUT MASS NOTIFICATIONS

by Dave Nagel | THE Journal (Technology Horizons in Education)

The Los Angeles Unified School District is deploying a mass notification system to provide emergency notifications to parents and students and to offer regular alerts on district events and news. According to the NTI Group, which is providing the notification system, LAUSD is now the largest district in the United States to deploy such a system across the entire district.

LAUSD is using the Connect-ED service from NTI for its notifications. The hosted service provides notifications to mobile phones and land lines, text messaging to cell phones and other mobile devices, e-mail notifications, and TTY/TDD messaging. It also sends out alerts in multiple languages. Aside from emergency notifications, the system will be used at LAUSD to inform parents of announcements, conferences, meetings, sports/club events, holidays, and other information.

LAUSD comprises 1,155 individual schools, from pre-kindergarten through adult, with a total K-12 enrollment of 708.461. It employs more than 77,000 personnel, including more than 36,000 regular teachers.

•smf notes: The ConnectEd service is extremely well utilized in the Houston and Dade County School Districts. This implementation is one of the first outcomes of the Superintendent's Comprehensive Assessment Team (CAT) investigations of success stories and best practices in other districts and within LAUSD.

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