One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits is “What Up with That?” Kenan Thompson plays the hilarious Diondre Cole, and I am sure some of you are thinking ParentSquare now has a website product, what’s up with that? Well, here you go!
I recently attended FETC in New Orleans, TASA in Austin and TCEA in San Antonio over the course of two weeks as we launched Smart Sites. I talked to hundreds of customers and made multiple media appearances. I want to share feedback and what I learned on the road.
Innovation & Focus
Many customers asked – “So, are you going to be like ‘X’ website or ‘Y’ website?” My answer was no, we will be ParentSquare. We will always be a family engagement company first. Communications companies have been around education for decades. While we do communications quite well, we are a family engagement company. You can expect the same disruption and innovation with websites that you have come to expect from ParentSquare with communications. We will continue and focus on being the premier family engagement platform…now with websites.
There is a reason they are named Smart Sites and you can expect exciting news as we listen to customers, grow and build for you! The bottom line is family engagement with a website is a more powerful product than a website that has added a communications layer with limited family engagement tools. Customers told us this over and over again – you get it!
Student Success
I mentioned in several of my interviews in Louisiana and Texas that there are five decades of research about how family engagement drives student success, better attendance, and increased social and emotional health for students. We also know that parents and guardians are often bombarded by school information from multiple disparate sources and sometimes tune out. That is why ParentSquare was invented, to give families a choice on many aspects of their engagement experience. But we can do more.
Websites tend to be “everything” all in one place – the “encyclopedia” if you will of the school district. The problem is that sometimes these websites still have Pluto as a planet, or nothing at all. In addition, why do you need to go to the website if the website can come to you in an app? Things change rapidly in schools today. Families need to see relevant personalized information, where they are, on the go. In short, they need a smarter website. Stay tuned…
Keep It Simple
What if you just had to be awesome at family engagement and the rest took care of itself? Your website was always alive, relevant, and up to date. At ParentSquare we conducted focus groups across the United States prior to the launch of Smart Sites. A common theme was that websites were the “front porch” of the school district, but ParentSquare was already the inside of the school district. If the front porch was simple, clean, and functional, the tool many already had would do the rest.
Educators have enough on their plate. Duplicating work on a website is not something they have time for. Communications directors would show me rich, vibrant ParentSquare pages for teachers, but blank teacher websites. We are excited to give time back to educators so they can focus on their students, their families and helping them find success.
For us, Smart Sites is about getting every stakeholder involved in a child’s education, especially those that previously had little or no voice in the process. We want those hard to reach families connected. We want the families that don’t speak English to be heard. We want community members without children in the district to feel like they are included in the most vital aspect of any community – the schools.
So, there it is, that is “what’s up” with the Smart Sites launch. We are excited and proud to begin this new era of family engagement.
Posted Thursday, February 9, 2023
