As we kick off the new school year, here are a few reminders about how we communicate in emergencies and how you can help stay connected.<\/p>\n
The ACPS Office of Communications handles all communications related to emergency situations and weather events. If an emergency impacts individual schools and not the division, the Office of Communications will work with the school principal on all communications.<\/p>\n
In an emergency, ACPS staff should:<\/p>\n
School Administrators will receive text message alerts. However, ACPS does not have a way to automatically include all staff in text message alerts.<\/p>\n
Staff can sign up to receive division-wide emergency alerts via the City of Alexandria’s alert system. Please note: These alerts are sent by the ACPS Office of Communications and are NOT sent from the city itself: Subscribe via the City of Alexandria website<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Emergency notifications and weather alerts are first posted on the ACPS website<\/span><\/a><\/span>. If they pertain to a specific school, an alert is posted on that individual school\u2019s website<\/span><\/a><\/span> \u2014 sometimes both the school site and the ACPS website.<\/p>\n Depending on the situation, an all-staff email may be sent.<\/p>\n Notifications may also be made on or through:<\/p>\n Please take a moment to read the post in ACPS Express on How ACPS Communicates in an Emergency<\/span><\/a> a<\/span>nd review the frequently asked questions about emergency procedures<\/span><\/a><\/span> and weather alerts and emergency notifications<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n A top priority for ACPS is ensuring that we have critical parent\/guardian contact information \u2014 a current home phone number, cell phone number and email address, at a minimum \u2014 in PowerSchool for every student in our school division.<\/p>\n If you work with students and their families, please remind them of the importance of having current and accurate contact information in PowerSchool and encourage them to return the Student Information Update Form (PDF)<\/a> from the Welcome Packet to their school as soon as possible in the new school year. Parents may also complete this form and all back to school forms online via Parent Access (PowerSchool)<\/a>. If you are a homeroom teacher, you may be asked to help collect contact data forms from your students.<\/p>\n Our goal is to be able to communicate with every family in real time during an emergency and we can only do this if we have a current home phone number, cell phone number and\/or email address for them. Help us reach our goal of 100% of families with contact information in PowerSchool by the second week of school!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Take the time to familiarize yourself with the way ACPS will communicate information to you during an emergency, and learn how to sign up for division-wide text message alerts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":7493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-announcements"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-12 04:40:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7486"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7523,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7486\/revisions\/7523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Collecting Emergency Parent Contact Information<\/b><\/h2>\n