The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts has partnered with the software company Possip to empower parents to share feedback, needs or ideas for the school.
ASMSA is the first school in Arkansas to use Possip and the first residential school to partner with the EdTech company.
Corey Alderdice, ASMSA director, said Possip is a tool that allows schools to increase parent engagement by seeking their opinion, whether it's weekly, biweekly or monthly.
"A lot of times, parents have things on their mind about their child's school no matter where they are," Alderdice said.
The biweekly reports will have a general satisfaction rating for parents to grade the school. Parents will be able to choose if they are happy, most happy, or not happy about the school for that week. The report will also allow the school to take the temperature of the community, putting responses into three categories such as hot, medium and cool.
"Hot items are the kinds of things that are big enough that you want someone handling that and jumping in to be responsive as soon as possible. Medium topics are things that will probably play out over the next month or several months during the semester," Alderdice said.
"And the cool topics are the kinds of things that as we look at bigger institutional planning, maybe for next school year, or even over the longer term, things that you might want to take advantage of and be mindful about," he said.
Possip looks through individual responses and pulls out some of the strongest comments. These will be the good things as well as any recurring themes that are coming across from multiple parents, Alderdice said.
"We have the opportunity to go line by line, response by response," he said.
ASMSA always seeks out ways to better connect with parents, Alderdice said, noting he feels the most significant challenge they face as an institution is that parents are spread across 75 counties, and can be five minutes to four hours away from the campus, he said.
"So for us taking that extra chance to connect with parents to make sure that we're addressing their needs, and also hearing the things that we're doing well, that's an incredibly powerful resource for us to have," he said.
There are many ways ASMSA engages with parents, Alderdice noted, whether it's daily email updates, the opportunity to schedule meetings with faculty and staff, or the school's online Parent Association Facebook group.
"I think the way that parents particularly benefit from Possip is that concept of a nudge. Little things add up over time. I think it's especially important whenever there's something on a parent's mind, whether it's big or small, to know that there are people that are ready to hear and listen to what those concerns are," he said.
Giving the parents a nudge reassures them that the school is here for its students, he noted.
ASMSA benefits from Possip because the school gets a more significant sense of overall parent satisfaction with the faculty, the staff and the institution as a whole. The first two surveys the school received showed that 95% of the parents are happy or satisfied with the ASMSA experience. For the parents with concerns about the school, ASMSA had a chance to follow up with them about the matter, Alderdice said.
"The good news is the majority of those parents that have expressed concerns were ones we had already been having conversations with in the past week," he said. "So we had the general shape of what was on their mind, but it presented an opportunity to double back and make sure that we had been able to address the issue to their satisfaction."
"Schools like ASMSA are redefining family engagement by showing parents that they don't have to be physically present in a school building to participate in their child's school experiences," Shani Dowell, founder and CEO of Possip, said in a news release.
"Whether parents are working, providing military service, or have their kids at a residential school, they should still be able to easily participate in their child's school experience," she said.
Local on 02/23/2020