The Hillsborough County School District recently adopted an automated telephone system to alert families to events and emergencies. On Monday, that alert sent most parents of Ippolito Elementary School children into a panic.
And it was all a mistake.
About 11 a.m., workers at the Riverview school assembled the names of a dozen students who were absent and entered them into a computer system designed to call their parents.
The system, called the Immediate Response Information System, cost the district about $1.5 million, and is used mostly to relay routine messages: report cards, canceled classes or the occasional school emergency. The principal at Plant City High School used it last year to quash rumors that students were involved in gunplay.
Ippolito is one of 22 county schools that use the system to quickly alert parents to absent students.
Somehow - administrators say they don't know why - Ippolito sent a message to the parents of all 700-plus students that their children never showed up for school.
Within a few minutes, "the phones were quite busy," schools spokesman Steve Hegarty said.
Workers were able to stop the message from going to every parent, but by the time the school realized what happened, the system alerted parents of about 600 children that their children were absent. The school then sent out a second message, telling parents to disregard the first, acknowledging it was an error.
Until they figure out what went wrong, schools will no longer use the system to check attendance, Hegarty said.
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