Keeping You Informed

Sharing pertinent school and district information  is a top priority in the Johnston Community School District. Accordingly, we have adopted the Blackboard Connect Notification Service to send telephone and/or e-mail messages to you regarding weather-related closings, emergencies or important school events. Our goal is that in the event of an emergency situation, you will be informed immediately by phone and/or e-mail.

Blackboard Connect works with our student database, Infinite Campus, and doesn’t require any sign up by parents. Contact phone numbers and/or email addresses will be taken from Infinite Campus data. Johnston High School and Johnston Middle School also use Blackboard Connect for attendance calls.

Helpful Tips

Contact Numbers and E-mail Addresses

  • Blackboard uses contact information stored for parents in the Infinite Campus system. No sign up or other “activation” is necessary. If you need to update or correct your contact information, please call your child’s school office during regular school hours to update it.
  • In non-emergency situations, you will be e-mailed at the e-mail addresses you have on record in Infinite Campus.
  • In emergencies, or when school will be dismissed during the day or cancelled all together, the system will call all phone numbers and e-mail all e-mail addresses on record for the family in Infinite Campus.  This includes the the “emergency contact” person(s) you have listed in Infinite Campus.
  • Certain messages may be sent to specific grade levels, as opposed to district-wide.  For example, a message about cancellation of evening activities may only be sent to parents of secondary school students if no other classes or schedules are affected.
  • Phone numbers need to include area codes.
  • If you do not have children in the district and feel you received the message in error, please call 515-278-0470 and ask for the Communications Department. Please allow 24 hours for your phone/email to be removed from the Blackboard list.
  • If you do NOT get contacted and feel you should have received a message you should first check for any sent messages to your phone number and/or email address before calling the school. If you are not receiving email messages, please check your spam/junk mail folder.  If your email is a work email, you may want to check with your technology department to see if the email provider is allowing emails from our notification system to go through or not.  Some email providers for personal accounts allow the individual to set their level of spam control and you may need to adjust that to allow emails from Blackboard Connect to come through to you.If you do not have a child attending that building, this may be the reason that you did not receive a message.  In the event of an isolated emergency at a specific building, the district will not send a message to all parents.  Instead, the system allows us to send messages only to those parents on record as having children in the affected building. If you do have a child in the affected building and did not receive a message, please contact your school’s office to determine if your contact information is up to date.

Caller ID and Voicemail

  • Caller ID will display 1-855-473-7529.
  • Blackboard Connect leaves messages on any answering machine or voicemail.
  • If the message stops playing, press any key 1-9 and the message will replay.

 

For more information on Blackboard Connect or if you have a question, please call 515-278-0470.