OVERVIEW

Driving Your Success

As providers of the premier K–12 school-to-home communication suite available to educators, we at ParentLink are excited to partner with you in providing unrivaled tools for supporting your commitment to your students and community. Here are a few of the ways that we feel ParentLink aligns with your goals and objectives:

Increase Student Achievement

Our primary goal is to increase parental involvement in their children’s education and improve each student’s overall achievement. Currently, schools across the country are using ParentLink to reach out to parents and students online and over the telephone. Today’s ParentLink goes beyond the idea of basic parent messaging and provides up-to-date information about each student’s grades and assignments, personal messages from the student’s teachers about what is going on in the classroom, and so much more.

Increase Management Efficiency

Before the advent of automated notification systems, educators had tried many time-consuming, labor-intensive, and highly ineffective methods for reaching parents. For example, Orangeburg Community School District #5 employed their attendance office staff to personally call every absent student. When Orangeburg implemented ParentLink, they freed up countless man hours of phone time and contacted more parents than ever before. Other districts have used ParentLink to increase their efficiency through:

• Standardization – One district-wide system reduces training and management time
• Single Login – One system provides access to attendance, grades, lunch balances, and more
• On-demand Reporting – Information at your fingertips when you need it.

Improve Public Support and Confidence in Schools

ParentLink helps foster good communication—the key component in any trusting relationship—through user-friendly survey tools, dedicated community components, and more. Automated surveys make it easy to create interactive questionnaires and automatically tabulate the results. Working with Naperville Community USD #203, we created a public portal for accessing non-sensitive data and automatic notification of new information upon request.

Create a Positive District Culture

ParentLink does more than simply notify parents: it transforms the entire district culture. The Vermont Department of Education found that ParentLink resulted in 74% of parents feeling more involved, 90% of teachers provided detailed class information through ParentLink, and 77% of parents said ParentLink was the one factor that made their school better. Other schools have seen increased parent and teacher satisfaction, higher test scores, improved attendance, and reduced drop-out rates.

Safety above All Else

Like many of the vendors you may have already researched, ParentLink makes emergency notification easy. But ParentLink goes beyond mere notification with safety-enhancing features like an inbound tip-line that allows students to report threatening or illegal activity, and interactive surveys to bring potential problems to the district’s attention.

Student Learning Is the Main Thing

We understand that no amount of technology can substitute for a world-class curriculum and an excellent teaching staff. Our goal is to give all the key players in a student’s education the best tools available to help build the student-teacher relationship, including automated messages that notify parents about their students’ struggles and improvements. ParentLink lets parents know when their children are missing classes, or their lunch balances get too low.

ParentLink also empowers teachers to reach out to parents. Teachers can leave messages for parents about class activities, offer ideas for helping their students finish their homework, or send personal messages to the parents of each student regarding areas of concern. ParentLink creates a team environment where teachers act as one member of a team that includes parents, administrators, and the students themselves.

Parents as Partners

ParentLink is founded on the idea that parents play a vital role in their children’s success. While notifying parents of their students’ academic performance and attendance are important, effective two-way dialogue between parents and teachers is what makes the greatest difference. In addition to teacher-initiated messages, parents can actively participate in two-way conversations with teachers through email and voice messages. ParentLink opens the door to an environment where parents and teachers can talk every day — not just at parent-teacher conferences.

Common Decency

Every parent deserves respect and dignity. For this reason ParentLink’s flexible tools allow parents to control where and when the system contacts them. By working with parents, ParentLink schools have seen improved message reception and positive attitudes from parents.

Coalition of Support for Public Schools

Public schools are the keystone of the community, but they require public support to function effectively. ParentLink helps you build a sense of support not only from parents, but from the entire community through regular public notices, and ParentLink has tools that have been designed specifically to increase community usage.

Serving Minority Populations

ParentLink helps schools bridge culture and technology gaps by providing inbound and outbound access to information over the telephone, Internet, and printed letters in multiple languages. Unlike systems that only permit the manual recording of multilingual messages, ParentLink automatically provides much of its content in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole—and the list keeps growing!

Autonomy for Individual Schools

Years of experience have taught us two key things: any program will fail without central district support, and any program will fail if individual schools can’t use it to meet their unique needs. ParentLink provides both district backing and flexibility for individual schools. Only ParentLink has the ability to give each school the ability to send messages independently, create their own look-and-feel), and use features that benefit them specifically—all under the control and backing of the school district.

Facilitating Innovation

While we do our best to provide the most comprehensive messaging solution available, we understand that our changing environment results in constantly shifting communication needs. For this reason we encourage broad and vigorous use of our system to constantly pursue new and innovative ways to reach out to parents, students, and the community to improve education. We look forward to working with you as you uncover new challenges and develop solutions that both meet and exceed your expectations.

Achieve Success

The ParentLink team is like any other district employee and we expect to be held to the same high standards as everyone else. We actively work with you to ensure that ParentLink is being used throughout the district to its full potential. In this partnership with your district we will not feel successful until you do.

Focus on Performance

By subscribing to ParentLink ASP you are joining a team of professionals who are dedicated to your success. You are also committing to dedicate some time with our educational consultants to help us assess your goals and develop a strategy for using ParentLink to resolve issues you are currently facing.