Quick, think of the trip between here and the closest supermarket. You likely drive it every day, tell me the speed limit in each area you pass through. You can’t. You probably know, and you’ll likely notice the signs next time you drive it, but I’m fairly certain you couldn’t tell me with any certainty. Why? Because you pass those signs every day and you no longer notice them. The first few times you drove the route you likely saw each one, but now they’re just background noise.
That’s the problem with things that occur, happen, and exist every day, they blend in. It’s my gripe about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts using the emergency signs on the highway to congratulate the Patriots, or remind me to buckle up; eventually I no longer bother to look at the sign because I know it’s a pointless message. Until it’s not. Some day that sign will warn me of an accident ahead, a tree across the highway, something…that I won’t find out about until it’s too late because I won’t have read the sign, assuming it was just some other feel good message.
This is why I’m of the mind that Town of Auburn Superintendent of Schools Dr. Maryellen Brunelle is putting the children under her watch in danger. See, she has a powerful tool at her disposal, the One Call Now system the town has purchased. She has used the system in the past to let parents know about a sexual predator sighted in the vicinity of one of the schools. She has used the system to let everyone know about school closings in inclement weather. All perfectly reasonable uses.
However in the past two weeks she’s also used it to let us know about Auburn Rockets hockey game. Today she used the system to pass along a message about the schools participating in a local charity drive being coordinated by a third party business. Mind you, just yesterday we received a paper about this in our child’s backpack.
So thank you Dr. Brunelle. Thanks to you there’s now going to be a filter for your emails in my box. This way I can check the filtered messages once a month or so to see if there’s anything actually relevant. However, if you let me know that the school’s exploded via email, I can pretty much guarantee I won’t find out about it until I go to pick up my kid. Then I’ll have wished there was an emergency contact system you could have used…appropriately.
Edit: Just as an addendum….I’d be fine if the town had a priority 1 and priority 2 opt in type of setup where the P2 folks get emergency and junk mail stuff and the P1 list only gets emergency, but from what the folks at Education told me, it’s an all or nothing proposition right now.