Pearson prepares to deliver message

You can’t say the Lester B. Pearson School Board is afraid of embracing new technology.

Its school commissioner meetings have been paperless for a while, it struck a deal to provide mini-laptops for its pre-kindergarten program and its monthly board meetings are webcast live and archived for a period on their website. Now, Pearson has purchased a time-sensitive mass-notification system from California-based Blackboard Connect for about $66,000 so school officials can send thousands of voice or text messages out in mere minutes to its employees, parents and students.

“This will allow us to contact parents or guardians of all 30,000 students in less than 10 minutes,” said Pearson chairman Marcus Tabachnick, adding parents can provide more than one format to contact them, from their Blackberry, e-mail to home phone.

“For safety and security matters, it’s a huge advantage,” Tabachnick said. “From a community point of view, this is more efficient and better direct communication.”

Aside from delivering emergency or urgent information across the Pearson community, such as closures due to snow storms, local school authorities could send a message to just their parents, such as a meet-the-teacher-night reminder, Tabachnick said. “They could even send messages by class to remind parents when a project is due or that there is field trip tomorrow and that their child needs to bring a bathing suit.”

Board officials will monitor the use of the new community messaging system to make sure it is being used by all schools, and also used properly. “We’re not doing telemarketing,” Tabachnick emphasized. “We don’t want people to get annoyed by it.”

The new service should be set up by next month and school administrators will then be trained to send messages.