Board looking at alternates to inform parents of school evacuations and sudden dismissals

By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

The Tri-County Regional School Board understands parents want to know, and expect to know, if their children are being sent home unexpectedly from school.

And so the board is in the process of setting up a system where parents can get those phone calls even if staff at their child’s school don’t have access to phones.

Bill Curry, the board’s director of programs and students services, says the option they are exploring is to make those phone calls from the school board office. He is looking to have the schools supply updated and accurate student contact information that can be made into spreadsheets and kept at the board office for easy access.

In the event of a sudden evacuation, the board office staff would be directed to start calling parents and guardians if those calls cannot be made by the school. Curry says admittedly it won’t be as good a system as when it is school staff and teachers making the phone calls.

“But at least they’ll get a warning that the kids are coming home,” he says.

The shortcomings to the existing system came to light recently when Drumlin Heights Consolidated School was evacuated after a threatening note was found at the school. Because the note threatened to blow up the school, the RCMP was called in and students and staff were not permitted in the building. The decision was made to send the students home. However the normal phone calls that take place when students are being dismissed early – like on a storm day, for instance – could not be made by the school.

Curry understands the concerns of parents, especially if students are being dismissed abruptly and are being sent to an empty house because no one is home. But in the recent incident, he says the situation was unavoidable.

“Understand our position. We had 450 kids, or whatever the number is, out on the soccer field with teachers,” he says, adding the board is pleased with how the staff handled the situation. “The school did everything by the book, in fact they went beyond. They put kids on buses and then they said you know what, the parents don’t know they’re coming, we need to do more.”

So the school put the teachers and other staff on the buses Curry says.

“When they rolled up to a stop with a Grade 1 getting off, the teacher got off the bus with the Grade 1 and went to the door and made sure someone was home,” he says. “The school did everything they could do but the issue was they were told by the RCMP, ‘You’re not coming back into the school until we’re through with our investigation.’ So by the time they got back in there, kids had already started arriving home.”

Phone calls were still made to homes afterwards, Curry says, but having a system where those calls could have been made from a remote location before the fact, like the school board office, would certainly be an improvement to the process.