CHCCS Says 83% Of Lockdown Alerts Were Successfully Delivered

After Tuesday’s precautionary lockdown at Chapel Hill High, some parents are wondering why they didn’t get a phone call alerting them to the incident, but Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s Executive Director for Community Relations Jeff Nash says the majority of those calls were delivered.

“Eighty-three percent of the phone calls were considered successful deliveries; 17 percent were unsuccessful deliveries,” says Nash.

The school was placed on lockdown due to an altercation between students in which one student was reportedly pepper-sprayed by another student by accident.

Nash said it took approximately ten minutes to locate the pepper spray and confirm the incident was under control. Once that happened, the automated calls went out.

“The message went out at 2:48 p.m,” says Nash. “According to our stats it took eight minutes for the message to go out to all the phone numbers, so by 2:56 p.m. everybody had been called.”

1,151 calls were successfully delivered to either a live person or an answering machine. The 244 calls that were not delivered mostly went unanswered.

Nash says the call was an outreach call, a type of update that is usually delivered to a family’s primary contact number. Had the situation been more serious, Nash says the school would have sent out a message to all possible contact numbers.

“There’s also an emergency message that we can use in some situations where it would reach every phone number a parent has, up to six numbers per household,” says Nash. “In this case it was an outreach message so it was more of an update on ‘here’s what happened, it’s been handled.’ It went out quickly and it went out as a phone call.”

Nash notes that in some cases, families may have dropped a land line in favor of mobile phone service, but forgotten to alert the school system to the change.

If you are the parent of a child in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and you want to update your contact number,  you can contact the Data Manager at each school.

Here’s the full breakdown of how Tuesday’s outreach calls were delivered:

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