Challenges
- Difficulty locating and accounting for every enrolled student during remote learning
- Unable to provide a printed option for homework assignments
- Struggle to maintain contact with families affected by lack of housing and internet access
Solutions
Results
- Located and accounted for all remote students within the first week of remote learning
- Continued delivery of homework assignments by sending PDF attachments through text
- Successfully engaged all families even those forced to move during the pandemic
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, districts across the country—and NYC—struggled to maintain communication with their students and families. Schools lacked the information, infrastructure, and tools necessary to locate and engage every student; old or unknown contact information, a lack of translation capabilities, and an inability to monitor student attendance remotely left many districts in the dark with large portions of their communities.
How NYC DOE KiNVO Schools Responded
For KiNVO schools in the NYC DOE, the story looked quite different than the national average. The software went from being schools’ communications and attendance platform to becoming its central lifeline to crowdsource updated parent and guardian contact information, communicate with parents, distribute school work, perform wellness check-ins, and more.
The average rate of KiNVO messages exchanged per student increased 200 percent compared to any other recorded month, and remained at that level through April. The abrupt switch to remote operations in March caused the use of KiNVO to balloon, but the increased usage proved to be out of effectiveness and not desperation. The following case studies highlight the positive outcomes schools experience as a result of investing in crisis attendance management.
P.S. 153 Adam Clayton Powell Elementary School
Reaching All Families—Regardless of Internet or Housing
Located in Harlem, P.S. 153 has done a great job improving and maintaining attendance.
Karen Bailey, the Principal of P.S. 153, and Annette Schaffer, the Assistant Principal, have worked to implement strong practices that keep students and families engaged. They say that KiNVO has been the tool to facilitate these practices, and their effort has led parents to expect regular communications and processes such as weekly homework sheets.
Schaffer explains, “We print and distribute a weekly homework sheet that goes home with each student every Monday. The students use it for their homework every night so that the parents, teachers, and students are all on the same page with the required work, and we also include important announcements and reminders.”
When COVID-19 hit and schools were asked to close, many schools had to stop effective processes like P.S. 153’s homework sheet, but P.S. 153 was able to carry on as usual.
“When schools went remote, the teachers continued to send the homework sheet to parents every Monday as a PDF text message attachment. This created a smooth transition for students and for parents because they were receiving the same information they’ve been getting every Monday every year since their student was in kindergarten,” says Schaffer. “It was a piece of familiarity that gave the kids, the parents, and the teachers consistency—it removed anxiety because the process was familiar.”
In regard to communicating with families, P.S. 153 acted swiftly. Bailey says, “Two days prior to leaving the building, we asked every teacher to connect with parents using KiNVO. We made a list of parents and guardians that didn’t respond and set up a small team to reach out to any other family members we had on record. When we left the building, only 30 families out of nearly 500 had not responded. During the first week of remote learning, we got that list down to just one student that we were searching for.”
The one final student was challenging to track down, and after days of outreach with no response, the opportunity for engagement started to look bleak.
But then something wonderful happened.
“We received a message, and it was from the parent!” Bailey continues, “We learned the family was in temporary housing, and the parents were in dire straits so they packed up and moved in with a family member. As they were moving, the parent’s phone was shut off due to financial difficulties, so they were out of touch for multiple days. All of a sudden, her phone turned on due to government support and the first thing that popped up on her screen were all of the KiNVO messages with our check-ins and updates. She immediately responded to confirm they were safe and to explain what had happened. The student has been attending and submitting school work every day since then.”
“We now have nearly 100% of our students engaged in learning, which is higher than our regular average during ‘normal’ times. It just makes me smile.”