Prior to unified communications, we were using a hodgepodge of different tools for school-to-home communications, none of which worked particularly well or got the job done. Our communications were what we call “chop suey,” or basically everything under the sun.
Teachers used phone, email, and our student information system (SIS). The school sent out its own mass attendance notifications and we were leaving emails for parents whose kids weren’t in school. The SIS offers both text and email options, but it was very cumbersome to the point that teachers rarely used it.
Complicating the issue even further was our 1970s-era campus phone system, which doesn’t allow calls to numbers outside of the immediate vicinity. Put simply, if it’s not a Honolulu number, we can’t call it. To circumvent the problem, teachers were using their cell phones and Google Voice, both of which further complicated our communication approach.
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Ready for a change, we decided to implement the ParentSquare unified communications platform. One of our feeder elementary schools was using the program and recommended it because it was affordable, good for posting/messages and able to translate messages into different languages.
Once we put the platform in place, it was pretty obvious just how sorely we needed this tool. Here are ways the platform has helped us streamline communications, reach a wider audience, and increase engagement across all of our parents and families:
1. Overcome language barriers. We have to do annual individual education program meetings to update our special education students’ plans, and one of our families speaks Spanish. I realized that the parents were also receiving communications from school that they couldn’t understand. We showed them how to download the communications platform app. We would send them messages in English, and they would send us responses in Spanish, with the platform translating everything for it. The parents were just blown away by how easy that was.
2. Reach parents when everything else fails. Like most schools, most of our communication internally is handled via email. But for notices that need to be more urgent, it’s vital that we have a platform for disseminating that information. For example, when our power was out at school we couldn’t email or call, so we used our school-home communication platform to text all faculty about school being canceled that day.
3. Meet parents where they are. We can create groups for their student clubs and then teachers use those groups to interact with their students. Our Parent Teacher Association and Parent Community Network Center both use the platform for interacting with parents and sharing information about community events. With a percentage of our families residing in public housing—located about 1-1/2 miles from campus—we use the Parent Community Network Center for many of our community meetings.
4. Increase attendance rates. Before implementing the unified communications platform, we were dealing with very sparse attendance numbers at mandatory graduation meetings and open houses. In many cases, those low attendance numbers were because flyers were sent home with students but never made it into their parents’ hands. For reinforcement, we’d send out a message using our SIS—a tactic that also wasn’t working very well. Maybe a dozen parents would show up at those events.
That changed at the school’s first mandatory graduation meeting, which took place just after we launched ParentSquare. We gave them a choice of two different dates, and on that first night more than 70% of graduating students attended. It was pretty amazing.
5. Leverage the power of text. Our platform’s text feature is critical because no one really wants to talk to the school. If you call home, they see the school number and they won’t pick up. You leave a voicemail, and they’ll return your phone call one out of 10 times. As a result, text has been the easiest way to push out information. Parents can just respond quickly via text if they want to come to the event or absorb that information, whatever we’re trying to push out. That’s been a great engagement tool for us.
Unified communications is an easy win
We haven’t made the use of our unified communications tool mandatory, but we are working to get more teachers using the platform. I always tell them that teachers and parents don’t need training on how to use the program. You can just play around with it a bit and be good to go. When you can just jump into the technology and start using it like that, it’s always going to be an easy win for us.
