Lumpkin County's Recipe for Academic Success: Prioritizing Family Communication

Finding the Clear Path Forward

Lumpkin County School District in Georgia, led by Superintendent Dr. Rob Brown, needed to significantly improve their family-teacher communication. With over 6,600 students in the communities of Auraria and Dahlonega, the district faced challenges managing and tracking communications across channels.

To support their Mission to educate and empower life-long learners and their Vision to prepare all students for successful and productive lives in an ever-changing world, Lumpkin County needed a solution to streamline communication, overcome language barriers, and monitor conversation quality.

Integrating student data with communication tools, SchoolStatus enabled proactive collaboration between schools and families. After implementing SchoolStatus, the district achieved 72,000+ family engagements and improved communication efficiency, transparency, and organization.

Dr. Brown tasked Jason Lemley with finding a new tool that gave leaders the ability to stay informed and develop better communication.

Existing Solutions Didn’t Fit All Their Needs

“There was no clear plan in place,” said Director of Community Engagement, Jason Lemley. “We wanted our schools to become better facilitators of partnerships rather than just the local educational entity.”

Teachers were using a variety of apps and some didn’t have a specific tool. None of those solutions quite fit the bill.

With hundreds of conversations taking place each week between parents and guardians, teachers, principals, nurses, and more, Lumpkin County Schools needed organization and transparency.

Finding the Right One-Stop Solution

“Parents send us the most important piece of their lives each day: their children,” said Dr. Brown. “We need parents to see our schools as their partner in—not the owner of—their child’s education. Our efforts to be proactive with purposeful communication is to develop that collaborative mentality. We believe our students have the best chance for success when their parents and the school have a positive relationship. All relationships need effective, frequent communication to thrive.”

With a vision in place, Mr. Lemley and his team began searching for a tool that would show where communication with parents wasn’t happening, where it was, and what was being said. “We needed a way to evaluate and measure engagement with parents,” shared Mr. Lemley. “What we found was that SchoolStatus would provide that solution with the oversight and the measurements that we were looking for.”

Mr. Lemley and his team researched many parent communication options, with three choices making it into a final evaluation. “We heard from and demo-ed the paid version of Remind, Kinvolved, and SchoolStatus,” said Mr. Lemley. Lumpkin chose SchoolStatus for the engagement metrics and transparency.

Leveraging Data-Driven Conversations

SchoolStatus integrates assessments, benchmarks, and more to put student data on the same screen as parent communication tools. Each communication whether a call, text, email, or video chat becomes a record in the digital student profile. “SchoolStatus was the only platform where a teacher or an educator or a principal or counselor, whoever it may be, when they’re having that two-way communication with parents, it 
is informed by the data,” says Mr. Lemley.

The combination of traditional student data and parent communication data creates a comprehensive view with a whole-child approach. 

Lumpkin County School District soon found that SchoolStatus delivered even more than the district was originally looking for. “What was more impressive was that SchoolStatus provided us with a method for informed conversation.”

The ease of accessing the data is appealing to principals and teachers alike. “Two clicks to make a phone call,” said Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction Whittney McPherson. “And it’s right on your computer screen.” Communication with parents increases once the methods are as easy as possible. “It takes the excuses away,” she explains. “It’s easy. Everything’s all in one place.”

Best Practices for Teachers

One of the benefits of administrator oversight is the ability to share best practices with teachers based on situations from within the district. “I can pull real-life examples,” shared Mr. Lemley, who has made this practice a regular part of his engagement strategy with a newsletter.

His bi-weekly email includes research, a communication tip, and a specific task for teachers to try in their communication with parents. Communication oversight is particularly helpful with Georgia’s Teacher Keys Effectiveness System. “There are 10 standards in TKES,” said Mr. Lemley. “Two of those standards are communication and professionalism.”

Boosting Compliance with On-Demand Data

“SchoolStatus is the perfect tool for an administrator,” according to Mr. Lemley. “When you go into a classroom and do a 25 or 30-minute observation, you might be able to see content knowledge and use of differentiated instruction, or whether or not that’s a positive learning environment, but you’re not going to see communication between the teacher and parents.”

Administrators are able to listen to automatic recordings of parent conversations in SchoolStatus and read text messages and emails. “With SchoolStatus, they are able to click on a teacher and look at their engagement data,” explained Mr. Lemley. “They can also use it in their school as examples of best practices or to be able to give a shout out to a teacher who sent 5,000 texts in the last month, for example.”

Laws, regulations, and internal policies necessitate providing proof that parents have been informed on things like Special Education measures. “Our Special Ed Department, our Special Ed Director, and our Special Ed Coordinator, they love SchoolStatus,” shared Mr. Lemley. “They’re able to go in and see the conversations. Record keeping and communication are such a big deal in special education.”

Contentious conversations occasionally happen district-wide. “Prior to SchoolStatus, it was his word against her word,” says Assistant Principal Dr. Whittney McPherson. “If we had a parent that was upset about a phone call or a text message, it was hard to support your teacher because you didn’t actually know what really happened.”

“They’re not going to remember all the details of everything. To be able to log in and view those text messages or listen to those phone conversations has been really important,” said Dr. McPherson. It also adds a layer of protection for teachers for when a student fails a class. “With SchoolStatus we see a record of everything, every text that was sent, every phone call that was there, every voicemail that was left.”

Dr. McPherson described an issue she had recently with a parent who was upset. 
“I pulled up SchoolStatus and I hit play. Five minutes in, I hit pause, and I set up a meeting with the teacher.” Dr. McPherson quickly found what she needed by listening to the original conversation instead of second-hand accounts. “They enabled us to deal with the issues directly.”

Finding Success

Communication transparency and oversight have been a game-changer for administrators, and teachers love the ease of communication as well.“Our staff would have my job if I even thought about changing! SchoolStatus has provided us a tool to make communication easier, more transparent, and quantifiable,” said Mr. Lemley.

Metrics in SchoolStatus reflect the enthusiasm teachers have for reaching out to parents. “The total engagement for one school alone between calls, emails, and texts is over 72,000 engagements in three months. 1,200 of those are phone calls.” Mr. Lemley shared. “The other schools are right there with them. It’s impressive.”

“SchoolStatus has provided us a tool to make communication easier, more transparent, and quantifiable,” said Dr. Brown. “We expect our staff to communicate frequently and professionally with parents, and now we have a tool to monitor that expectation. The old adage that we should ‘inspect what we expect’ is now something we can do easily and without adding an extra burden on our staff to track and record each conversation or communication. SchoolStatus gives us an efficient and effective avenue for each employee to develop partnerships with parents.”

To learn more about how SchoolStatus can help your district engage more families and create a positive learning environment in schools, contact our team.