Call 855-878-8477

Free resource

The K-12 phone system readiness checklist

The first week of school is the loudest week your front office phones will have all year, and it is when most districts find out whether the system was ready. This checklist is what we walk through with K-12 clients before the first bell. Every item has a yes-or-no answer, and none of them require a purchase order.

  • 45 yes-or-no checks across eight areas, all testable without buying anything
  • Directory and extensions for any staff change, new hires and people who left
  • Paging zones, bell schedules, and outdoor coverage at the car line and the field
  • 911 by building, plus the on-site escalation step that usually gets skipped
  • Front office call flow for the week your phones are busiest
  • A scoring guide and a notes table for what failed, who owns it, and when it is due

Download the checklist (PDF)

No form required to download. Three pages, built to print and tick with a pen. Run it yourself, then tell us what failed.

Something on the list failed?

Tell us which items came back weak and our team will review your current setup with you. No charge, and no obligation to change anything.

We reply within one business day.

Who this is for

Directors of technology, network administrators, and the front office staff who answer the phone on the first day of school. It is written for a public district with several buildings, though charter schools and single-campus schools can skip the items that do not apply.

Why the weeks before school starts

Most of what goes wrong in the first week is configuration rather than hardware. New staff without extensions, paging zones that match last year's calendar, a 911 call that reports the district office instead of the building it came from. All of it is fixable in an afternoon while the building is quiet, and all of it is painful to discover while a hundred parents are calling about the car line. That window is late July or early August for some districts, late August for others, and it moves again for a year-round calendar. What matters is that it is before your first bell, not that it is a particular month.

What happens after you download the checklist

Run the checklist yourself. That is what it is for. If an item comes back weak and you want a second set of eyes, call 855-878-8477 or use the form on this page and tell us which ones. We would rather you find the gaps before the first bell than during the first week.

The long-form version of the checklist, with the reasoning behind each item, is in our post on how to evaluate a K-12 school phone system.