USA Today: Gov. David Paterson has signed legislation to require New York City schools to notify parents by e-mail, text messages or phone calls when there's a school emergency.

Scheduled to take effect in January, the measure requires an alert system at each of the city's public schools, subject to regulations by the schools chancellor. Parents, staff and community members can choose whether to sign up.

Assemblyman Rory Lancman, a Queens Democrat who sponsored the bill, says schools can minimize costs by plugging into the state's NY-Alert system, where more than a million New York residents already have signed up for notifications of traffic, weather or other safety issues in their areas.

The idea for the alerts came about after a public school in Queens went into lockdown in 2007 because a student had written a threatening note.

"Parents were not notified," Lancman said. "Some parents were waiting for the school bus to bring their kids home and they never showed up. Nobody really knew what was going on."

Lancman noted that St. Johns University in his district has an alert system that activated in 2007 when a student was caught on campus with a gun. Students, faculty and staff were notified by e-mail, phone or text of the emergency and told to stay in classrooms and not walk around.

By contrast, the sponsors noted the absence of emergency notifications during the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, where students continued moving around the campus in Blacksburg unaware there was a gunman on a shooting spree. Lawmakers noted that most of New York's state and city university campuses either have or are implementing emergency alert systems.

The recent closings of city schools because of swine flu outbreaks again showed the difficulty with getting quick, accurate information to parents, Lancman said. "I got a lot of complaints from parents that they don't really know what's going on."

Following negotiations over two years, both the city Education Department and the State Emergency Management Office, which operates NY-Alert, signed off on the measure, Lancman said.