How to Get iPhone Notifications for School Delays & Closings

If you live in an area that gets snowed on heavily during the winter months, here’s how to receive notifications on your iPhone when there are school delays and closings.

If you live on the east coast or in the midwest, snow is inevitable during winter, and with enough snow, it’s possible for schools to get delayed or even close for the day. If you have kids or are in school yourself and hate having to constantly refresh your local news website to find out about delays and closings, you can automatically get notified when such events occur, right on your iPhone.

However, it’s a bit tricky, since it all depends on where you live, so in order to get notifications for school delays and closings, you’ll have to rely on what your local school system or news channel provides as far as options.

Here are some options to look out for in order to receive iPhone notifications about school delays and closings.

iPhone Notifications for School Delays & Closings

There are a few ways that you can receive notifications on your iPhone when there is a school delay or closing. The most popular option that many news stations offer is the ability to sign up for text alerts and receive a text message whenever there’s a school delay or closing.

For instance, one of my local news stations offers text alerts for all sorts of news, weather, etc., but I can also pick specific school or a specific school system, so whenever there’s a delay or closing for a school I specify, I’ll receive a text message about it.

Check out the websites of your local news stations to see if they offer a similar feature like this.

Another option is to see if your school system has its own mobile app. Usually, you won’t see this in smaller towns, but bigger cities with larger school systems will sometimes have their own iPhone app that you can download from the iTunes App Store. Here in Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne Community Schools has its own iPhone app, although it’s rather lacking in the design category.

However, it will do the trick if you want push notifications for school delays and closings, and in even bigger cities, mobile apps for school systems are probably a bit better than what you’ll find in my city of residence.

If your school system doesn’t have an iPhone app and your local news stations don’t offer any kind of text alerts for school delays and closings, most news station website do have RSS feeds that you can follow. However, in order to get certain updates from that RSS feed to reach your iPhone, you’ll have to use a service like IFTTT. Luckily, we have a handy guide on how to use IFTTT (it’s catered toward Android, but it works the same on iPhone as well).

You can set up IFTTT so that whenever there’s a new update to the RSS feed, you’ll get a push notification. You can even specify it and include keywords so that you only get a push notification when one of those keywords is mentioned, like a school delay or closing for your specific school.