Editor's note: Helen Hironimus is the project manager for the Palm Beach County Schools.

In recent years, Florida in general -- and Palm Beach County in particular -- has regularly made headlines during the hurricane season, prompting federal, state and local first responders, and other critical community officials, to hone the region's disaster response and recovery plans.

When thinking of disaster recovery, emergency response or homeland security, your local public school district isn't likely the first institution that pops to mind as playing a critical role. And yet in almost every scenario that involves the rapid mobilization of local communities, schools often play a multi-faceted role as a staging ground for first responders, a shelter for displaced citizens, and a communications/ information hub for confused and disoriented constituents awaiting official instructions from government leaders.

Because of the unique role that our schools play in serving our community, we often have the best access to local contacts -- parents, teachers and other members of the community -- who are useful to emergency responders during times of crisis.

The connection between the work we do in the Palm Beach County School District and the operations performed by our county's Division of Emergency Management has always been critical. But in recent years, we have taken steps to further integrate our systems and our procedures to accomplish two critical objectives:
· To better prepare our 20,000 employees, 175,000 students and their families, and hundreds of customers and partners to respond quickly, comprehensively and in a highly targeted manner to disasters -- whether natural or man-made; and
· To leverage the technology that we use on a day-to-day basis in a way that improves our ability to protect our students and serve our community.


Responding to Incidents
Our district came face-to-face with a real emergency six years ago when one of our students shot and killed a teacher. This post-Columbine tragedy shocked our community -- and the country.

There were many rumors swirling around right after that shooting in 2000. As the campus became a crime scene, parents wanted to know their children were safe. We were overwhelmed with information requests, but we learned how important it was to get parents involved in the response to a crisis situation like this early in the process. We realized we needed to have more robust systems in place to provide accurate information readily available to them.

In the wake of the shooting, and in response to the major natural threats that would manifest themselves more predictably during the hurricane seasons, schools throughout Florida were mandated by the state Legislature to establish systems that would notify parents if kids were absent from school at any point during the day for any reason. The idea was to keep careful track of the students put in our care, and to let parents and guardians know immediately when children were no longer under our supervision.

For a county like Palm Beach -- which is so large, with a population of more than 1.2 million in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau -- that was a tall order. On any given day our county will have up to 10,000 absent students. And today, the parents or guardians of each absent student must, by law, be notified if they are not present. Even spread out over 163 schools, the mandate to inform parents -- and ensure that an effective communication has occurred -- placed a heavy strain on our already scarce human and technical resources.


Bringing Technology to Bear
In an early effort to incorporate technology into the solution, school principals began deploying devices in each of their facilities that deliver recorded messages by automatically dialing through the school's telephone systems. This, however, was a point-solution to the problem, and