How Pass Christian Public Schools Reached 100% of Families with SchoolStatus

Pass Christian Public Schools

Pass Christian Public Schools consistently ranks at or near the top of Mississippi district rankings. To continue on their path of excellence, Pass Christian Public Schools wanted to get a better sense of the district’s data to support student success. They started off manually importing data into spreadsheets, but this proved to be too labor-intensive. As the district sought to streamline data analytics into one automated tool, Pass Christian Public Schools turned to SchoolStatus. With SchoolStatus, the district saw immediate improvements in school-home communications and how they were able to respond to student data.

Transforming How the District Handled Data 

Superintendent Dr. Carla J. Evers joined Pass Christian Public Schools in 2016, ready to meet high expectations from the community. It wasn’t long, however, before Dr. Evers found an issue that almost every district is familiar with: they needed help managing, analyzing, and responding to data.

“We were treating our data as more of a gallery wall. We had all these data rooms—you would walk in and there would be stuff all over the walls. In some instances when I first got here, some of the schools had relics of what used to be a data room, but it is now a storage room. Stuff was on the wall that we never took down,” Evers explains. “So I felt like our data became more of an art gallery. We would walk in and look at it and go ‘hmm’ but we were not actually leaving the data room and going out and saying ‘this is the action we need to take as a result of it.’”

Dr. Evers began stripping down an overabundance of underutilized programs and got back to some familiar basics in K-12 data analytics: spreadsheets.

“We put a lot of human labor into looking at our data and analyzing our data,” she explains. “Really getting people to own their data and understand their data a little bit differently… It was doing what we needed—but of course it was all labor-intensive.” 

Typically with even the best of spreadsheets, getting disparate data points to talk to one another is difficult, and not everyone knows how to use formulas correctly. It was a big ask of her team. Pass Christian Public Schools needed a solution that would improve how they collected, analyzed, and responded to data.

Streamlined Data, All in One Place

Over time, data competence grew within the district, but it came alongside spreadsheet burden. As the district began to seek out less manual data solutions, Dr. Evers found that many solutions didn’t meet their needs to integrate data from other products.

Dr. Evers did her due diligence in making a data analytics choice for her district that included calling around to other high performing districts in the state. As it turned out, they all use SchoolStatus. “Listening to those superintendents talk about how impactful SchoolStatus has been in their school district inspired us to [use] someone we know who is proven in our state,” she explains. “You don’t often get that with companies—you have to kind of take what they have sometimes and try to make it meet your needs. But I feel like SchoolStatus is trying specifically to meet the needs of leaders and teachers in the state, and that’s important to us.”

“SchoolStatus has all of these things pulled together—we can look at our attendance, our discipline, we don’t have to build that. Everything is already done for us,” she explains. SchoolStatus integrates with all the data sources a school district is already collecting, from state assessments to benchmarks, LMS and SIS. By being data agnostic, SchoolStatus is able to offer tools for analysis that answer questions concerning disparate data points, unlike other solutions.

Making Data Actionable

The automatic, integrated data inside of SchoolStatus has enabled Dr. Evers to build stronger relationships with stakeholders by making information accessible and actionable. 

“It’s more actionable for us because of the Student Cards.” The Student Card in SchoolStatus is where the collected data is disaggregated for each student and has tools for calling, texting, and emailing guardians. “The Families and teachers can look at all aspects of what is going on with a child right there. We can pull in from all our other data packages and be able to see everything that’s happening with a child from their grades to their behavior to their attendance. When we are meeting with Families we can just pull the student’s data up,” Evers explains. 

With SchoolStatus, districts can set data access based on role. Each member of the district is able to access and view only the data that is necessary for them. The company upholds strict FERPA regulations this way while still making data as transparent and accessible as possible. 

Diving deeper into her data, Evers continues her investigation by creating customized groupings based on parameters in district data and mapping them geospatially. Her lists update automatically when a student reaches certain criteria or, alternately, drops out of said criteria. “I ask ‘What are we looking like with discipline? Where are we having issues? What part of our district are our discipline referrals coming from?’” she says. “We can see if we need to have a targeted approach. Maybe we need to push into the neighborhood and do some events. Maybe I need to attend church in that neighborhood and ask the pastor and the church family to help us with issues that we might be having.”

Spotting trends and needs isn’t just about finding problems either. Dr. Evers intends to connect and support every student in her district. “That feature also tells me where my children who have zero office referrals come from.” Evers takes cues from what is working already within the community for potential solutions in other areas. “Is this community doing things differently with their children? Do they have community events? What’s the student outreach in that particular community versus one who may have struggles?”

Like other successful school districts, Pass Christian Public Schools prides itself on a strong relationship with the community. “Our relationships with our families and the partnership we have with our families are what make us great.”

“It was a bridge for us from the school to the home that we just wouldn’t have had if we didn’t have SchoolStatus.”
—Dr. Carla J. Evers, Superintendent, Pass Christian Public Schools

Results

Using data segmentation within SchoolStatus and acting on that data allowed Pass Christian Public Schools to better engage their students’ families. “In just one week, we went from less than 100 text messages and communications, because we were piloting, to this week we’ve had 16,000 points of communication with Families. We’ve gone from 0-100 pretty quickly.” Dr. Evers can see how frequently communication is happening, and all conversations are recorded for accountability and transparency.

“It was a bridge for us from the school to the home that we just wouldn’t have had if we didn’t have SchoolStatus,” says Dr. Evers. 

Continue the Conversation

SchoolStatus empowers your district with the data to support meaningful relationships between administrators, your educational staff, and your students’ families. Contact our team to see how SchoolStatus can help your district achieve its goals.