Emergency phone trees in our district have always been handled by the PTO. Do you have Room Parents? We have a "Room Parent Chair" for each grade level... and then a "Head Room Parent" for each room. When emeregency arises, the first call goes to the President (me), then I call the Room Parent Chairs... they call their Head Room Parents... (at most 10 people at the middle schools, maybe 6 at the elementary)... then each Head Room Parent has worked their own calling procedure with a few parents in their particular class room. We have almost 800 kids in our middle schools... and this procedure has worked pretty well for a lot of years.
Not sure what you mean by party list... but all that kind of stuff is handled by our PTO volunteers.
Our directories are generated from the master database the school maintains. The data is downloaded into a flat file and imported into a Word document in the format we want the addresses to appear in the directory. This way, we are using the "official" name/address/phone # of record for each student. (It's must safer this way... kept me out of the middle of a child custody battle trying to negotiate which parent's name/address/# would appear in the directory.)
I may have a solution for you that many school in IOWA and across the nation use. Please contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I will forward you the URL of the system we use at my school. It is pretty neat and very inexpensive. (it uses the computer).
I am a tri-President this year, as we have 3 elementary schools that will merge into one new one this Fall. Our school secretary previously has done party lists and the emergency phone trees in the past, but we will be responsible for doing this in the future.
We are going from 100 kids to 400 kids and wondered how other schools are handling this, and if there might be a way to do this on the computer somehow.
