Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
TEKOA — It was two years ago when someone had seen a suspicious person walking on school grounds and a Tekoa school went into lockdown.
Resident Wendy Sienknecht got a call at home from the school’s notification system, since her husband is a bus driver.
“I locked the doors and looked out my windows all afternoon,” she said.
Then her mother-in-law and her niece drove up.
“Did you hear what’s going on?” Sienknecht said.
“No, we were at Chicken Tuesday,” they said, referring to the special at the former Feeding Station restaurant. It was the start of an idea.
After months of work beginning last May, the city council approved unanimously in February to create a phone warning system. The city will pay $1,000 per year to a company in New York.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Mayor Troy Wilson. “If you don’t have kids in school, you don’t get notified. It’s not just parents in town, but for everybody in town.”
Sienknecht is a fourth-year city council representative and thought of the fire department. She asked if the noon whistle could be used as a general warning system, for events like the dangerous propane leak at the high school in the 1990s or the chemical spill at the Wilbur-Ellis plant in the 1980s.
The fire department turned Sienknecht down, wanting the siren to be used for only fire alarms and the noon whistle. Plus, the sound was just a warning, with no information to go with it.
“The more I looked into it, the more it wasn’t the way to go,” said Sienknecht.
She thought of expanding the school’s Honeywell phone warning system to the town in general.
Soon she was in talks with the company about a phone system based at city hall, for which the clerk would program messages, including “all clear” after an emergency has passed.
“People would say, ‘Wendy, you’re getting too excited,’ and I say one word, ‘Freeman’,” she said, referring to the nearby school shooting in 2017.
Then Honeywell did not call back. Sienknecht heard they were getting bought and the new company would not continue the phone warning systems.
She started again and found K12 Alerts, the New York-based service. The city could subscribe and anyone in the town may sign up.
Sienknecht took the city water bill list and called phone numbers and went door-to-door in Tekoa to ask for subscribers. She had 195 sign up, including 15 out of 25 businesses.
“Wendy worked really hard, and I sincerely appreciate that,” said Wilson. “Floods, winds, whatever, if we think it’ll be a good idea to notify everyone, then we’ll use it.”
The new system is expected to go live in mid-April.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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