Case Study:
Santa Ana Unified School District
Santa Ana Unified School District (USD) is located in Orange County, California. With 56 different schools and over 50,000 enrolled students, it is one of the largest school districts in Orange County. Santa Ana has a Unified dialing plan and is running over an integrated Avaya voice network.
Custom Features Used To Notify Parents And Staff District-Wide
The Challenge
The principal of each school in the Santa Ana Unified School District needed access to a system that
would enable them to create, schedule and distribute notification alerts. These alerts would have to be
available for immediate dispatch via an easy-to-use phone or web browser interface. Often the district
had a need to immediately notify parents and staff of weather-related events that affected the school.
In addition, the district wanted to be able to widely broadcast PTA announcements, and to automate
absentee notification, whereby a student’s parents are notified when they are not present in class.
It was very important to the district to address absentee notification. In a district such as Santa Ana,
student attendance is directly tied to budget revenue. With a budget in place, an absent student meant
a portion of that revenue that would not be paid by the State of California. The district needed to put a
control into place capable of creating a return on their investment in this technology.
The district had been using a web-based autodialing system that had been in place for years, but the
system was aging and in need of an upgrade. The district paid for the use of this system on a per use
basis; a model that Santa Ana wanted to get away from.
The Solution
Amcom Software¹, together with business partner SBC (now AT&T) introduced the district to
Xtend Flash Alert®. Xtend Flash Alert mass notification system included the TESS™ feature set
enhancement to the base product. TESS (Telecommunications Enhancing School Safety) is a suite
of application features that provide functionality to the district’s existing telephony system that is
more in line with the needs of a K-12 school district. In the case of Santa Ana, these needs were for
absentee notification and ad hoc alert capabilities.
Flash Alert was installed in late July of 2005 in a trial scenario. This began initially with five
schools; within five months Santa Ana USD had placed over 150,000 calls to parents within the
district notifying them of important events or meetings. Attendance at these important events has
increased dramatically as a result.
Based on the program’s early successes, Santa Ana continued to roll out the solution in late 2005.
All principals within the district were trained on the application in preparation for use of
the absentee notification feature set. To accomplish this, Flash Alert will get daily feeds from the
district’s enrollment system to automatically notify parents if their child has missed a class. This
feature set was a customization to Flash Alert to meet a specific need that Santa Ana USD identified
as important to them.
The Results
Santa Ana Unified School District had completed deployment of the TESS solution district-wide in
January 2006. The cost savings experienced during the first six months of use with over 150,000
calls placed has more then paid for the initial system investment. The solution has addressed not
only the need of the district to address absentee notification, but has also addressed a more pressing
need to keep the parents involved with planned events throughout the district.
Attendance at planned events has more than doubled when the notification system is used. Santa
Ana is now looking at expanding the system to handle numerous requests by individual school
administrators to use this tool for maintaining communications to parents and the community.
