Imagine eating lunch at Togo’s with some friends when your phone buzzes with a text message from Saratoga High.  The message alerts you that the school is going into lockdown because of a suspicious person on campus.  What do you do?

Thanks to the emergency text alert, you now know not to return to campus.  Your parents have also been notified and will be watching for updates.

This is just one possible use of the new emergency texting communication tool implemented by the Los Gatos Saratoga Union High School District.

With this new tool, parents will be notified sooner of incidents on campus and will be able to avoid panic while trying to investigate what’s happening with their children.  Before this system was implemented, parents would have been notified of emergencies by a mass email, which they may not have checked right away, and before that perhaps a calling tree, which could have taken hours to complete. 

For students, the text message system could be crucial to their safety during a campus emergency. 

While it may seem unlikely that a threatening situation might occur at Saratoga High, this emergency texting system could have saved lives during events on other high school campuses.

One example is the Columbine High School shooting of 1999, in which two seniors in Jefferson Country, Colo., opened gunfire on their peers and teachers for over 30 minutes.  Twelve students and a teacher were killed, and 21 people were injured.

If an emergency alert had been sent out toward the beginning of the Columbine massacre, perhaps more students would have been able to safely flee the area or find a secure place on campus to hide.

Students and staff in the library, which was targeted later in the attack, may have been able to escape or secure the building.  Given even the remote chance of such an event happening here, this emergency texting system is a good precaution to take.

Although students and parents who opt-in to the program may have to pay a fee of less than a dollar from their cell service carrier for receiving a text message from the system, it seems like a relatively low price for increased safety.