With 3,300 students across three different schools, our district was using a variety of diverse applications for school-to-home communications. They all handled separate aspects of our teacher-parent communications, but they weren’t cohesive.
We started looking for a new solution in 2019 that would consolidate the multiple, disparate tools into one platform and then quickly kicked that effort into high gear at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
After speaking with other districts about their experiences using school-home communication platforms, and taking our own technology director’s recommendation to heart, we decided to implement ParentSquare. We put together a core group of people that would be using the new communications technology we adopted in order to assess how well it would work for their teams and respective buildings.
By April, we were trained on and using our new platform for all our school-home communications needs. The timing was ideal. We completely ignored the advice that says, “don’t change how you communicate in the midst of a crisis” and instead focused on grouping all of our communications activity into a single, safe and secure location.
Equity and Integration Made Simple
From our new communications system, we wanted an application that was both visually appealing and user-friendly. We didn’t want users to have to go through a lot of cumbersome clicks or steps, and we needed a platform that could handle translation for students whose first language wasn’t English.