Software Helps Schools Communicate With Parents And Stay Organized

What if school administrators could alleviate some of the weight they carry in their briefcases? One modern-day school principal relies on Google Calendar and a hand-written planner. You read that right: hand-written.

While we all love a good, old-fashioned notepad, imagine the chaos across all your staff’s agenda books. It’s not easy to conflate the principal’s jotted notes and the Lit Department Head’s scrawl.

We asked an administrator from a Virginia non-profit preschool her thoughts. She enjoys the status reminders of Remind and Procare, but admits there are a couple inconveniences to both options.

Remind’s free version limits the number of classrooms to be logged and tracked, while Procare presents steep learning curves for already worn-out staff.

Read on for our unveiling of how school administrations band aid their wounds—as well as how schools that partner with us have relieved their pains for the long run.

Common Parent Complaints to Schools

We explore this exhaustive list of various parent-teacher communication methods below—although it’s enough to exhaust us!

The dreaded pick-up line: An in-person impromptu chat at your school’s drop off and pickup may work just fine—if you can squeeze everything you need to say between 27 other jostling parents in under 3 minutes. Will you remember everything by the time you make it back to your desk?

PTA conferences are a great place to discuss student and school progress, but waiting a month or a whole term for these to come around feels daunting and risks urgent attention to issues.

Confusing emails and frustrating phone tag: Sifting through an email thread for the urgent request or complaint tacked onto the end of a thread is not our idea of a fun or efficient start to the week.

Text messages are perhaps a little too direct. Could you imagine the endless pings?!

Newsletter updates are an idea, but perhaps a stretch, when compiled with 9 months of other handout material admins and teachers are already responsible for creating.

Websites as news sources: OK, now you’re getting somewhere. All schools are using laptops now. Although…we hope you have a great IT team at your disposal! Because your IT help desk can’t double up on their already stacked duties!

Sounds like these parents and school administrators could do with an efficient upgrade! There are probably way better ways to manage their needs and interactions…and prevent the potential mishandling of resolutions.

(If you agree, read to the end on how software has successfully boosted other schools’ issue-handling ability!)

Schools Get Organized with Issue Tracking Software

As we mentioned before, all schools are using laptops now. To take a leaf from Peter Parker’s book, with great technology comes great issues. What does this mean for your school’s IT help desk?

Potentially, overwhelm and disorder. With new tech, new worries come onto the scene with hardware breaking down and needing repair.

Software solutions saved the day for our partners at Renaissance Academy, pulling their IT help desk from the lion’s mouth. Technology Coordinator Todd Krock stated: “If a teacher or group of students is idle, they lose productivity. Issuetrak streamlines the help desk process for us and speeds up turnaround time.”

Most IT technicians are pulled in multiple directions at once, especially when they don’t have software to prioritize the most demanding issues. How can you help your IT help desk make order out of chaos?

3 School Administrations Stay On Top Of Issues and Upgrade for Quality Control

School IT Team Regulates Requests

Take Williamsburg James City County Public Schools for example. Their in-school technicians were getting stopped in the halls about all sorts of issues—many of which were not pressing or asked of the right person. The help desk ticket volume was ballooning beyond what a small tech staff could handle.

When they adopted a software solution, they could digitally prioritize issues by severity and automatically escalate each step of the resolution process to the most qualified teammate with the most suited skillset.

After all, you wouldn’t want to burden your techs with fixing forgotten passwords or replacing a mouse, right?

Admins Leave Paper Forms Behind, Manages Parent Complaints Digitally

The Lafayette Parish School District moved into the 21st century with us when they transitioned from paper forms to computerized complaint management.

Systematizing complaint resolutions and automating assigned roles made parents happy because they could get their complaints addressed by the right person in a timely manner. Talk about migrating to the 21st century!

Software Helps Overworked School Nurses Log Covid Cases Accurately

2020 brought about unforeseen life-altering circumstances to which we all had to dramatically adapt—school data not exempt. If COVID-19 gave us anything, it was the power to leave spreadsheets behind.

When hundreds of local health officials needed data updates, they got it. An overworked school nurse managed to log student cases without missing a beat or a tiny formula field in Excel.

Customized School Inventory Tracking without the Custom Price Tag

You could follow Portsmouth Public Schools' lead, favoring a custom organizer without the custom price tag. Tracing their assets by priority and location saves the school time and dollar signs over their inventory tracking.

Software Solutions Do More

If these suggested solutions don’t quite solve your school administrator’s problems, we suggest you read 4 reasons why you need compartmentlizing software or these 7 ways software gets schools organized.

This infographic may give your school a better visual of how a digital ticketing system could help you process issues more efficiently.

Choose a Digital Organizer and Cut Back your Stress

Now it’s your turn to visualize it: what do your school’s organization tactics look like? What’s it missing? Let us know, and we’ll suggest more solutions to your pesky setbacks.

Ride on the high and easy road with us using a digital platform to streamline your school’s IT help desk or parent requests. Or…you can stick to your agenda books.

The choice is yours.

P.S. Share it if you know someone who’ll benefit from what we’ve written here! School administrations need our help. Let’s do our part to empower all schools with better-digitized help desks and complaint management resolution tactics.

Download our hacks to a more efficient issue tracking help desk.