The Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 brought the need for aschool-wide alert system to the public’s attention, but LincolnCounty schools had already been working on the idea for quite sometime.

Lincoln County School District Computer Network TechnicianPatrick Brown said while the alert system has just been updated andoutsourced and officially kicked off on the school district’s Website, he had the idea in 2003 to start some sort of e-mail or textalert system for school reminders.

“I was just thinking about something small, and it really nevergot into action,” he said. “Kind of a homegrown system like ane-mail mailing list. After probably a year, we’d never sent analert.”

Lincoln County Superintendent of Schools Terry Brister said whennationwide coverage turned to every school’s need to have some wayto let students, faculty and parents know about emergencies, Browngets the credit for having already been on the ball.

“He was on this before then, we just didn’t do it at that time,but he’s been pushing,” Brister said. “I’m just elated to have it.I didn’t realize it would be this easy.”

Before Brown revamped and resurrected the system in recentmonths, he said he could almost count the times it had been used inthe years since he dreamed it up.

“With that homegrown system, we alerted people in 2004 whenHurricane Ivan came to Mississippi, but that ended up being theprettiest day ever,” he said. “But that evening was when WestLincoln school caught fire. Ever since then you can say it’s beensomething on my mind that we’ve always needed to work on.”

Brown said the older system also proved useful when HurricaneKatrina hit. He said that was the point when school officialsrealized the alert network was worth their time.

“Last time we sent an alert with the old system was HurricaneKatrina, when it was coming into the Gulf. We sent an alert thatschool would be cancelled the next day,” Brown said. “That waspretty much the only way we had employees that could keep up withwhat was going on. After that was over, we realizd that this is areally good thing.”

And Brister said that’s part of what he likes about the idea ofan alert system. When school is out for any reason, it givesemployees and parents centralized information so they know what isgoing on even if they don’t have power to get television orradio.

“When we’re out of school for weather, parents will call us allday and all night,” Brister said. “If we can do this and people inthe community get used to it and become aware of it, it will beeasier on us and a much better communications system foremergencies.”

So recently the system has been outsourced to a company inIdaho, which is actually a plus, Brown said. When the weather isknocking out power to everything locally, it also includescomputers and servers. Brown said with servers in another state,local weather will not affect the ability to put out thealerts.

“This way we don’t have to worry about the system going downwhen a hurricane hits the shore or whatever,” Brown said. “As longas we have Internet access somewhere, or we can call someone whodoes, we can send an alert.”

Brown and Brister said there is also an option to have a voicemessage call a phone number and leave a message or play directly tothe person who answers the phone for those who do not receive textmessages or do not have mobile phones.

In order to enroll in the alert system, interested parties canvisit the school district Web site at http://lcsd.k12.ms.us/, wherethey can sign up for alerts from Loyd Star, West Lincoln, BogueChitto or Enterprise.

“It’s got a lot of advantages to it and serves us in a lot ofways,” Brister said. “We play tag team every time we have badweather. This will solve a lot of it and be a lot moreuniform.”