Gisborne lost power for two days after a plane crashed into major power lines for the town. 40,000 people were left without electricity and sharing updates and news with each other became difficult.
The situation sparked Wiremu Elliot, Principal of Lytton High School, to seriously investigate better ways to contact parents during power outages and other unexpected events.
“What if we don’t have access to a computer? What if we have to evacuate? Yes it’s easy to post a message on Facebook from my phone in an emergency but there's no guarantee as to who will see it. We were looking for smarter ways to do this.”
As soon as the power was back on, Wiremu contacted School-links to discuss their Emergency Alert platform that can be used for remote messaging.
Their Emergency App was quickly set up using the School-links smart data-export facility for KAMAR users into their emergency platform. This provided Wiremu and his management team with a fast remote text messaging facility to connect with their parents and caregivers – all via their smartphones.
“I know there’s a lot of messaging apps out there, but this one is great because it can talk to KAMAR, and that’s important for us. That means that our information is as accurate as our information in KAMAR is,” says Wiremu.
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