Meet the small software company connecting millions of teachers and parents during coronavirus

Schools' Secret Weapon In mid-March, when coronavirus began sweeping throughout the United States, schools shuttered. For most districts, the decision to shut their doors came quickly. The result left millions of educators trapped at home with fragmented ways to communicate with parents and students. However, there were about 50,000 educators that had a secret weapon. They were already using SchoolStatus, a communication tool that allows teachers and administrators to send one-to-one text messages to parents without giving up their personal phone numbers.  "I can't imagine having done this without SchoolStatus," says Sanger ISD teacher Beth Sullivan. "I can text, call, and email parents with absolute ease! It's making a complicated time so much easier! SchoolStatus SchoolStatus was already a heavily utilized tool by 143 school districts. On any given day before COVID-19 SchoolStatus would facilitate about 125,000 messages between teachers and parents. Since COVID-19, the software company's usage exploded. They are now connecting teachers and parents close to a million times a day. SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis says they're seeing 700 - 800 percent spikes in traffic. "We're doing as much traffic in a week as we previously did in a month."  Davis says it's not just the volume that's significant, it's also when it's occurring. SchoolStatus is seeing major increases on Sundays.   How SchoolStatus got a head start on the Coronavirus   Russ Davis, CEO SchoolStatus Employees at SchoolStatus began discussing COVID-19 almost two months before the outbreak in the United States. On January 22, their sales operations manager posted an article about the coronavirus in one of the company's Slack channels.  "I'm sure you've been following this, but in case you haven't, the virus was discovered about a month ago and originated in Wuhan China," he shared with all employees. "9 deaths, 456 confirmed infections, about 2% mortality rate so far." Just days later, on January 27, a marketing manager shared a Facebook post of a friend of hers that lived in Wuhan, China.  The post was a frightening perspective describing how they were trapped in Wuhan. Her friend couldn't get on an evacuation flight out of China, read the Facebook post. They also had a father-in-law that had contracted the virus, but hospitals in Wuhan couldn't take him because all the beds were full.  By February, weeks before any schools shut down, SchoolStatus CEO, Davis, began planning. He started emailing all-hands announcing guidelines on how to prevent the spread of the virus at their three offices. Davis ordered hand sanitizer, UV-C phone/device sanitizers, and he asked all employees to stay more than 6 feet from each other.  Most crucial, Davis had already established a robust infrastructure to be able to "flip a switch" and allow all employees to work remotely. All employees had laptops, Zoom, and Slack credentials, and SchoolStatus VoIP phone lines directly into their homes.  "I'm kind of a paranoid guy by nature," says Davis.  "To me, this is like years in the making. Whenever we started seeing it spread more aggressively outside of that region [China]. We thought this is coming and it's not going away. That's when we started putting our plans in place." Scalability Having much of the United States and the world suddenly shift to remote work and distance learning has reportedly put a lot of stress on cloud computing. Davis says their system is built to automatically handle a pretty heavy surge in traffic but in order to handle as much as a 900% increase they had to quickly make some manual adjustments. The SchoolStatus developers spent the last couple of weeks enabling those changes. Davis says, "Things are autoscaling now, so whenever we see bursty traffic, the system automatically scales up and whenever that traffic goes down the system scales back down."   Davis says of the millions and millions of messages...