There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in.
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather.
And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. Really? Um, wow. How big is this school? Is the webserver on an ISDN
I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency notifications to another, larger system such as twitter, *as well as*
Roland Perry wrote: line? post to the school website (ideally via a blog, so you can use posterus to do both actions in one email). There's no fee, the cost to "set up"[1] is your time to securely configure a posterus account and a list to send to posterus (see below) and then to send an announcement post to posterus (and thus post on the school blog and on twitter) and to send an email to all students and parents notifying them so they can follow the school's announcement feed on twitter. jc [1] To setup: create an announcement mailing list with a name like post72045gh@school.edu - the name is kept private. The mailing list will send to posterus (and yourself - do NOT use this list to send to regular users - if you want to do that make a different list, a public list). This prevents students from sending out snow day emails by forging the school's secretary's email address and sending to posterus themselves - they would need to guess the name of the mailing list and send "from" that name to posterus to forge a snow day email. For even more security, set the list to no approved posters. The people who are authorized to send out the announcement will be authorized to *approve* posts from non-members (who are everyone). Anyone on the school staff can post (but still, keep the address private, only distribute it to those who need to know!). The posts are held for moderation and are sent to the people who can approve, and they have to click on the approval link and approve the post before it gets distributed. Test this system with the people who will use it, so that they understand what happens if they are the first one to click on the approval link, and what happens if someone else is first (no messages left to approve). Also, make sure they can remember the password for moderating the private email list - the whole thing grinds to a halt if none of them can remember their password at 4 am when they try to send a snowday announcement and it remains stuck in the distribution list and never gets out and posted. The usual system people use to remember an infrequently used password (of having a password on a note by the computer in the office) doesn't work at 4 am when everyone is at home. jc