TIP: Get School Closure Reports via Email and Cell Phone

If you've ever missed school late start, closure or other emergency information until after you've gone through the morning gauntlet, you may be interested to know that you can get emergency alerts sent directly to your email and/or cell phone.

For standard email alerts, just go the schoolreport.org email signup page, enter your email address(es), and you're good to go.

SchoolReport.org also provides a way for you to get "Pager Alerts", but signups for this service are often closed due to high volume (at the time of this writing, in fact). An alternate way to get notified on your cell phone is to use your carrier's email-to-text service.

Most cell phones these days can receive text messages (whether or not you use them). "SMS gateways" provide a way to take email sent to a specific email address and convert them to cell phone text messages. It's easy enough to test your phone — just send email to your phone's gateway address, and see if you get the text message. Here's a short table for common carriers:

So for example, if your cell phone number is 425-555-6178 and your cell phone is on the Verizon network, your corresponding email address would be

4255556178@vtext.com

Now all you need to do is to add that to the list of email alerts on the schoolreport.org web site, and you'll get all future emergency alerts right on your cell phone!