After what amounted to the first real use of the parent notification system on Monday, Walker school officials said they still need to iron out a few wrinkles in the system.

School improvement coordinator Michael Tipton said Tuesday morning, “We are working on a couple of enhancements/tweaks as we speak.”

Monday, the notification system was used to inform parents that buses would be running early to deliver high school students while buses would be late delivering elementary students.

The need for the reversal was due, in part, to a written bomb threat at LaFayette High School that was discovered on the floor of a hallway.

The bus route was flipped to have the high school students picked up first, then the middle school, and then the elementary students.

“There was a written bomb threat found in a hallway at 1:45,” a post on the school’s Web site revealed. “Students were immediately evacuated and 911 was notified as well as the superintendent. The building was declared clear by the LaFayette Chief of Police.”

According to Schools Superintendent Melissa Mathis, the real need for the reversal was to get the kids who had been evacuated from the building out of the inclement weather that had moved into the area.

Mathis said that the notification system contacted 4,095 on its first attempt to reach parents of the schedule change.

However, some parents complained that the message they received from the school was vague, with no specifics as to what was actually occurring at their child’s school.

Tipton said the system recognized the need for more details, saying, “We are looking at using voice instead of text for occasions such as this so that we can be more descriptive.”

Tipton said, more to the point, the system wants to be able to specifically target the parents of students who are being directly impacted by any incident occurring at their child’s school.

The information send out Monday through the notification system went to parents throughout the county, regardless of whether they were affected by the schedule change.

“We are working on sending specific information to specific schools,” Tipton said. “Even though we selected this feature yesterday, some messages went to parents in other schools. We are working with the company to make sure this does not happen again.”

Tipton said he was pleased with Monday’s performance of the system’s emergency procedures, “Our first responsibility is to safeguard our students and inform parents in a timely manner.”

Tipton said the school system is also working on plans of how to best alert the media to situations like those surrounding Monday’s bomb threat incident at LaFayette High School.

“To publish events of this nature tend to give undue attention to the events,” Tipton said. “We will work to give information to the media as the situation is concluded so that our community is informed of the actuality of the occurrence, not merely speculation.”