Following our early-morning announcement on Wednesday, January 25, that schools would operate on a two-hour delay, we learned of some communication issues with our notifications to staff. While email messages were delivered successfully within minutes, text messages were delayed by up to 40 minutes, and voice calls to employees failed.

BrightArrow, the company that provides our mass communication platform, believes this failure was due to a software “enhancement” that was recently added to our account. That enhancement has since been removed from our account, and BrightArrow does not anticipate future issues.

For your reference, we also experienced an issue with voice calls to families. While 85% of the subscribed numbers received our call within 15 minutes of initiation, we learned that calls to about 1,700 numbers failed because our caller ID was flagged as spam by multiple third-party cellular service providers. The helpful team at BrightArrow is continuing to work with these carriers to correct this issue.

As a reminder, all k12albemarle.org email addresses are automatically enrolled in our Electronic School Notification System (ESNS); however, employees also have the option of adding a personal email address and up to two phone numbers to receive voice and/or text messages. Please note: If you would like to receive text messages from ACPS, you must do two things:

1. You must use our ESNS web-based update tool to provide a mobile phone number and select Yes in the box that asks, “Receive Text Messages?”
2. You must opt in. When you receive your first text message from ACPS, you will also receive an invitation to opt in to future messages. Simply reply Yes to that invitation. (If you do not respond to that invitation, the system will not send you future text messages.) You can also opt in to text messages at any time by sending the word Yes to the short code 87569. Once you opt in, BrightArrow will send you a confirmation that your phone number is subscribed.

For more information about school schedule changes due to inclement weather, please see our January 12 Compass post or visit our Closings, Delays & Early Dismissals web page. And, as always, if you have difficulty accessing the ESNS web-based update tool or you need technical assistance, please contact the Service Desk at 434-975-9444 or ServiceDesk@k12albemarle.org.