One Simple Tool: Return Hours to Your Faculty and Staff

Educators would do whatever they can to get back even a few minutes of time each day.

From prepping lessons to grading assignments to communicating with families, so much happens in a day in the life of a teacher—both inside and outside the classroom— and the demands only get exacerbated as the number of students within a school district increases.

School districts, too, benefit when educators have more time on their hands, due to adopting powerful communication systems that enable them to perform tasks more efficiently. For example:

• Learning improves when teachers can focus more of their time on the education of their students
• Families are more engaged when teachers have time and space for Family outreach
• Productivity increases when educators are able to take time for breaks and attend to their physical and mental health

So how to save educators time as they tackle the whirlwind of duties that come at them each day? One solution is to adopt SchoolStatus Connect, a school communications platform that dramatically increases efficiency throughout school districts.

Saving Time with SchoolStatus

SchoolStatus Connect is a K-12 success platform that empowers the educational ecosystem of families, administrators, and educators. It delivers data that supports the critical actions of teachers and other stakeholders through solutions that impact positive, student-centered, educational outcomes.

One of the principal ways SchoolStatus drives this impact is by saving educators time. By centralizing information and streamlining communication to families, teachers can direct their focus to what matters most: educating and nurturing their students.

These benefits feed into a district’s family communication strategy, leading to improved family engagement, student achievement, and reduced absenteeism, as shown below:

Easy-to-Use, Time-Saving Solutions

Here are ways that SchoolStatus saves teachers time, giving them back hours every week and increasing productivity:

Two-Way Communication with SchoolStatus Connect

With SchoolStatus Connect—a platform that offers texting, emailing, and talking all on one screen—teachers don’t waste time switching from one type of communication tool to another. It’s partly why educators save 6 hours every week with SchoolStatus Connect. 

At DeSoto County Schools of Arcadia, Florida, a district of more than 33,000 students, administrators saved teachers countless hours by implementing SchoolStatus. Eighth-grade teacher Danni Harrison said that on Fridays, when she and other educators send out performance updates to families, they’re able to leave after only ten minutes. “And so, you’re done already. So then you open that conversation, like, ‘Yeah, let me help you get out on a Friday a little bit earlier.’”

Other teachers at DeSoto didn’t initially take to the idea of learning a new technology. Having experienced huge challenges of trying to continue teaching during the pandemic, educators felt they had no time to add more to their plates. But Principal Wendy Michael slowly introduced SchoolStatus, pointing out to teachers that it accomplishes so many of the tasks they already were doing on a daily basis—except SchoolStatus helps them complete those tasks much faster. “You can track your messages. You can have all of the documentation that you need right there,” said Michael. “So it kind of built throughout the year, and now I have a lot of teachers who use it very often.”

With SchoolStatus Connect, educators no longer have to take the time to sift through papers or disorganized digital files and folders looking for student information. All that data—assessment records, attendance rates, educational status, and more—is all quickly viewable on a dashboard called the Student Card.

The Student Card saves teachers a great deal of time by offering them the ability to quickly scan through and work with complex communication data. For example, teachers can see at a glance what emails haven’t been opened or responded to. They can also apply dynamic filters that allow for segmentation and personalization. For instance, they can send messages only to people who haven’t opened an email in the last thirty days or to students in a certain grade. What’s more, SchoolStatus’ Smore’s templates enable educators to quickly craft attractive emails to families using preformatted templates.

Gain Control Over Attendance Management with SchoolStatus Attend

SchoolStatus Attend, an attendance-management system, saves staff time and energy through automated processes that replace the manual stuffing of envelopes and other tasks used for attendance interventions.

This turn-key solution delivers positive, consistent, timely attendance notifications across a district providing detailed data that’s required to measure, manage, and prevent chronic absenteeism. It generates legally required notices, responds to chronically absent students, and manages conferences. The workflow-driven dashboard guides authorized users through the attendance-intervention process, identifying all students who should be sent an attendance notification or require a conference. 

The end result is that teachers save hours of time as they quickly access all student information, including days and periods missed, attendance-related notes, and conference activity and track at-risk attendance trends. Staff members reported that after implementing an automated management system, time on task was reduced by 50% to 70+%.

In one public school district, SchoolStatus Attend proved to be an educational game changer. Prince William County Public Schools, the second-largest school district in Virginia, turned to SchoolStatus to help with family communication to reduce chronic absenteeism. The solution fostered direct connections between educators and families and focused on the positive benefits of consistent school attendance. As a result, the school district was able to set up automatic interventions for chronically absent students.

Saving Time for What Really Matters

Tightening up efficiencies is critical to school districts facing such mounting challenges as educating at-risk students, decreased staff morale, and skyrocketing attendance rates. Districts can make a positive impact by adopting SchoolStatus and give teachers back precious hours they need to be able to focus on what matters most: educating and caring for their students and engaging with families.