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No Child Left Behind Compliance Insider

Proven to improve curriculum, assessment and teaching, technology continues to be a driving force behind student achievement efforts under NCLB. That’s why it’s critical for your district to continue to explore new opportunities to integrate technology tools into your schools.

District officials with Charlotte County (Fla.) Public Schools turned hi-tech after realizing an outdated way of reaching out to parents wasn’t working. The district discovered an effective way to use technology to get parents involved in school improvement efforts.

Interested in obtaining feedback prior to drawing up improvement goals for the upcoming school year, district officials contacted angel.com, a speech technology company, to help survey parental satisfaction — a major component of NCLB.

“We previously surveyed students and staff using an Internet application that was developed on site at CCPS.” said Amy Robinson, the district’s Web site design manager. “But we realized some parents may not have Internet access, so in order to get a more diverse demographic group, we decided to use a phone survey.”

To move away from paper-based, take-home surveys, district officials said they wanted something that would result in the most responses in the quickest amount of time.

Michael Zirngibl, president and CEO of angel.com, said districts can really benefit by teaming up with interactive companies to reach a large number of families in sizeable districts like CCPS. Here’s how CCPS’s interactive survey worked:

The district’s nearly 15,000 families received an automated-voice message asking them to rank the likelihood that they would recommend their child’s school to a friend or family member on a scale of 1 to 9 using their phone’s keypad.
Parents received the automated messages between 6 and 8:30 p.m.
If no one was home to take the call, the system would try to leave a message on an answering machine. If an answering machine didn’t pick up, the system would attempt to call back at a later time or date. This process took about two weeks.
The program cost the district a little less than $3,000. This included a one-time fee of $2,000. Development of this particular survey cost the Involvement district about $ 1.000.

Robinson said the program’s price tag was well worth the results: 38 percent of parents participated in the survey — a big increase from previous surveying attempts.

If your district plans on using similar technology, be sure you:

Do your research. Find out what’s going to be most economical for your district.
Communicate your needs. Robinson said district officials made their expectations for the program clear to angel.com officials.
Use your data. Once you’ve organized your results and used the data to implement improvement changes within your schools, you should survey your parents again to determine the impact of your efforts.