PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati Reflects on a Busy Back-to-School Season and Highlights PowerSchool’s Focus on Creating More Value for Educators and Students

This year, we experienced one of the busiest back-to-school seasons as districts focused on in-person, hybrid, and remote school openings and readying for a successful school year.

Amidst several challenges and complexities presented by the Delta variant surge, various federal, state, and local regulations including mask mandates, and more, we know this has been another challenging year for educators, students, and families. Just prior to the return to school, we seemed to be on a path to a more normal year, however it’s clear that our plans were upended once again as we encountered more unknowns.

Our main goal at PowerSchool has remained focused on partnering with you to help ensure educators, administrators, and students are supported and set up for a successful school year no matter where, or how, teaching and learning takes place. Our top priority has been to provide you with the tools you need to better support students and their needs, support educators, and improve operations—all with real-time access to the meaningful data you need to help make this all happen.

We’re also committed to supporting our entire education community, especially teachers who have shown so much resilience and been incredible heroes during these uncertain times. As part of this, I’m excited to share an update you’ll find below on how we are working with innovative universities and mission-driven organizations to further support teachers through the PowerSchool Education Fund.  

We’ve also been focused on delivering the dependability and reliability you have come to trust. We’re proud to provide you with increased successful engagement with our support and services teams as you navigated this year’s back to school. Our teams continue working diligently to provide exceptional levels of investment, innovation, support and services going forward. 

As we head into the final weeks of the year, I wanted to share my thoughts on what we have seen during this back-to-school season and highlight some of the growth and business momentum we’ve experienced that is helping us drive better value for you and support you in all you do. 

Introducing a Comprehensive Approach to Supporting Student Social and Emotional Learning and Mental Health

One important topic for both educators and students that has been on the rise even prior to the pandemic, but especially important to all of us as we went back to school this year, is mental health— and the need for help with social-emotional learning (SEL) and multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS). That’s why we’re especially excited to share we have just completed the acquisition of Kickboard, a leading provider of K-12 education behavior management solutions that helps educators effectively manage SEL and MTSS to help improve student well-being, school culture, and achieve more equitable outcomes.  

Adding Kickboard to PowerSchool’s award-winning Unified Classroom™ will enable educators to securely input and analyze student behaviors, interactions, and outcomes by connecting one of K-12’s leading behavior management solutions, including the only evidence-based, behavior management platform that meets federal standards, such as Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Level II, with industry-leading student information, learning management, professional learning, and data analytics systems.

This announcement represents PowerSchool’s and Kickboard’s continued commitment to helping ensure students can get the support they need for future success as lifelong learners. Adding Kickboard to PowerSchool will provide a more comprehensive approach to understanding and supporting the whole child. 

You can learn more about how this acquisition will benefit you by viewing this webinar. 

Business Momentum and Creating More Value for You

Since becoming a publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange this summer, we’ve experienced tremendous growth. We are well positioned to help you address the further digital transformation of your classrooms and offices, and better support students’ social-emotional learning and mental health.

PowerSchool recently announced its third–quarter earnings, and we’re proud to have experienced significant momentum in the quarter as our revenue grew 29% and we met or beat every guidance we gave for the quarter as well as raised our guidance for next quarter. Business momentum is very strong and our leading indicators are ahead of analyst consensus and our internal targets. We also continue making significant investments in our business; we’re now proud to have more than 3,000 PowerSchool employees dedicated to supporting you with your most critical needs. 

Also, as part of going public, we announced a $1 million initial donation to support the PowerSchool Education Fund, a multi-initiative fund designed to tackle critical issues in education, including the national teacher shortage, diversity gap, and access to education technology and resources. You may have recently seen we announced that PowerSchool has dispersed more than $820,000 through the fund to help new teachers enter the profession and has fulfilled hundreds of classroom projects for schools in underserved communities. You can read more about what we’re doing and the amazing impact stories in our latest announcement or by visiting powerschoolstg.powerschool.com/powerschool-education-fund/. 

Looking Ahead  

I’ve been thrilled to hear from many of you about the impact PowerSchool is providing, including insights to help understand areas of learning acceleration, and providing support for every child, by meeting you where you are with the right unified solutions to support your needs. It’s these stories that inspire and drive the entire PowerSchool team every day. As we know we are stronger as a community when we come together to learn and grow, I thought I would share some of these stories with you below.

Sharon Thierfelder, Assistant Director of Information Services at Aurora West School District 129, told us, “I believe PowerSchool has helped us by providing us flexibility and a variety of programs that we can customize, integrate, and analyze the data collected within the platforms in order to make sure that the work we are doing aligns with our vision and that our community of staff, students, and parents have the tools they need to be successful.”

And Coordinator of Assessment & Accountability for School District U-46, Matt Raimondi, says, “PowerSchool analytics makes data accessible to employees at all levels of the district. It is good to analyze trends, make comparisons, find outliers, trigger events, and increase transparency and accountability.” 

Kara Thorstenson, Director of Libraries and Instructional Technology for Chicago Public Schools, said, “Our district’s data dashboard has been crucial for use in central office to determine supports for schools, student engagement during COVID-19-related school closures, and more. Without this product in our district, I don’t believe we would have any meaningful way of gathering data across 600+ schools.” 

And Assistant Principal at Madison County Schools, Whitney Boggus, said, “Integrating PowerSchool has given our school the ability to truly customize and track our student achievement. The tools used for graduation tracking and at-risk assessment is a great way for schools to be able to use this data to personalize help for each student.” 

Looking forward, we remain focused on addressing the most critical issues facing K-12 education today and supporting each of you to ensure every student and teacher is set up for success.