The Santa Barbara founders of Parentsquare see their mission as a technology company with a social cause.
Founder and president Anupama Vaid calls it a one-stop shop for all school communication with ways for administrators and teachers to send out information to families and confirm whether people are getting that information — unlike the method of putting a flier in a child’s backpack and hoping it gets read.
“It’s two-way communication, not just schools blasting information to parents,” Vaid said, adding that it acts as a window to the classroom and a way for parents to find ways to be involved. “They can comment, appreciate, which is like a Facebook like, they can RSVP for events, sign up to bring things or volunteer. It brings a lot of tools together under one umbrella.”
Parentsquare is in almost 300 schools in 31 states, and one in Canada. In 2012, it started in four Santa Barbara-area campuses including Peabody Charter School, where Vaid’s own children attended at the time.
“It’s such a close to the heart thing with your own kids that it feels really good when you see things shaping and changing and you see yourself making a difference,” Vaid said.
The company’s efforts to increase parent engagement with its online social community mirror new state mandates to boost parent communication and involvement.
“The biggest issue when we talk to people is, they don’t know if the message is getting through,” said Linn Sillers, vice president of sales and marketing.
Parentsquare can tell districts which families are not being reached by email, phone or text, so schools can correct family contact information.
“We promise 100 percent reach if schools are willing to correct all that information,” Vaid said.
Parentsquare was in about 40 schools in September 2014 and started expanding rapidly after Sillers and some investors jumped on board, Vaid said. The company now markets to districts, not schools or teachers, so implementation is more universal within a school community.
“We were a little ahead of our time and now there are so many tools out there that are trying to do it,” Vaid said. “We had four years of development behind us. We made mistakes and learned what works.”
She has a background in software development and her husband and co-founder, Sohit Wadhwa, worked as senior director of engineering at Citrix before joining Parentsquare as a full-time CEO last year.
Parentsquare offers a smart alert system, which is required for schools, and tries to deliver messages as a text first, to reduce the number of phone calls from schools. It defaults to a call for landline numbers, Sillers said.
They aim to communicate to today’s parents with email and text messages, mostly, as well as push notifications on smartphones.
The alerts aren’t only for attendance notifications, early dismissals or emergencies, but for fun stuff like photo sharing, volunteer signups and classroom wish lists, Sillers said.
Those smart alerts are a big reason the Santa Barbara Unified School District plans to fund a districtwide implementation of Parentsquare next year, according to Todd Ryckman, chief educational technology officer for the district.
“We have been fairly unhappy with our current provider for attendance calling and smart alerts so we were looking to change,” Ryckman said. “The idea of having it all in one system was very appealing.”
Parentsquare can customize the system to the district’s needs, and Ryckman asked for a parent dashboard to put information parents want all in one spot, including attendance and grades.
“When it’s fully implemented, the idea is for parents to go to Parentsquare a majority of the time to get the majority of information they need,” he said.
Using Parentsquare was a grassroots effort in Santa Barbara Unified, where most schools have already implemented the system, according to Ryckman. He said it made sense to adopt it districtwide since so many feeder districts are already using it, including all of Goleta Union’s schools.
Santa Barbara Unified plans to implement Parentsquare districtwide next year for $42,000, pending final approval from the Board of Education.
There’s one major part of Parentsquare that Santa Barbara Unified is not on board with: using Google Translate for non-English messages.
“We don’t want to insult our parents by sending out messages that are nonsensical,” Ryckman said.
Teachers send out messages in English now and the district is working with Parentsquare to develop a plan to get human translators to handle all the outgoing messages, either at the district or a third party.
“We need to be sure to be very careful,” Ryckman said. “Technology is wonderful and gives us the ability to communicate more readily, but we want to make sure our ability to do that isn’t at the same time shutting other people out. We need to make sure we’re reaching all of our families.”
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.