Our Lady of Mercy School Telephone Broadcast Service

In our efforts to improve communications between parents and school, in July of 2006, Our Lady of Mercy School instituted a telephone broadcast system to enable 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 is also used to communicate general announcements or reminders. This service is provided by SchoolReach, which specializes in school-to-parent communications. The Diocese of Baton Rouge continues to report school closings due to snow or weather on radio & TV stations and OLOM will use this system as an overlay to the public announcements.

When used, the service simultaneously calls all listed phone numbers in our parent contact list and will deliver a recorded message from Tina Villa 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

NOTE: 1) This requires NO registration by the parent on the SchoolReach website. 
2). 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 225-924-1054, which is the main number for Our Lady of Mercy 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	In the event a cancellation decision is made the night before, or in the early morning hours, the broadcast message will be sent only to home phone numbers. In the event a cancellation decision is made mid-day, the broadcast message will be sent to home and cellular numbers. General announcements would be sent only to home numbers.
Message Repeat	At the end of the message you will be prompted to ‘press one’ to hear the message again. This is very effective when a child answers the phone and hands it to a parent, who can then ‘Repeat’ the message in its entirety.

              
If you have any questions, please contact Susan McKinley, OLOM Computer Data Coordinator, at 924-1054.

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:

• The system detects and measures the voice energy when the phone is answered.
• The system measures this energy in combination with the background noise and line impairments.
• If the system determines that it is a “live” answer it will immediately start playing the message.
• 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.
• 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 hear the message immediately.”

Some reasons for false detection:

• Loud background noise; television, radio, general noisy environment.
• Cordless phone that has static or other foreign noise.
• Not saying hello or delaying saying hello.

What can be done to remedy this?

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

 

400 Marquette Avenue
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70806
phone 225-924-1054
fax 225-923-2201

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