FLO Engage Supports Enrollment Planning for New High School

Client: Central Valley School District

Location: Spokane County, Washington

_{About the Project}

Central Valley School District didn’t need to wait until their new high school was built to learn which families would be interested in moving from their current high school to the new one. FLO Engage, a tool we built to help school districts connect with their communities, assisted CVSD in quickly and accurately gathering the information needed from families, explore responses, and then update student records in a student information system (SIS).

“FLO Engage has been an invaluable tool for our district to quickly determine student enrollment next year. This enables us to properly plan and implement appropriate staffing at all three high schools prior to student registration. Students will now know which teachers and courses will be available at all three of our high schools, which builds student and family trust in CVSD’s efforts in moving from a two- to a three-high school district in Fall 2021.” —Kent Martin, Assistant Superintendent of HR & Operations

_{Meet the Client}

Central Valley School District in the Spokane Valley of Washington State has about 14,500 students. The district spans both urban and rural communities, some of which have been experiencing high population growth, which CVSD has been accommodating through careful, long-term facilities planning.

_{The Challenge}

With the construction of a new high school nearly complete, CVSD was ready to figure out how many parents would opt in their students to attend. To accomplish that, the district needed a parent survey tool that could send out unique questions to families, depending upon each student’s year in school, and potentially follow-up with additional questions based on original answers. The district needed a system that could store the information and easily import it into a SIS to update student records. On top of it all, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted all school district operations, including the survey’s timeline. Quickly and remotely engaging parents about their choices for schooling with enough time to finalize a plan prior to the start of the 2020-2021 year was a must.

_{The Solution}

CVSD used FLO Engage to get collect the needed information from parents. Unlike regular survey technology, FLO Engage allowed CVSD to survey parents with specific questions and tie parent responses back to a specific student contact record. Emails to CVSD parents were sent out with unique links and customized pages so that when they answered the question posed by the school district, their response data (and all future response data) was connected to them.

For parents that preferred to provide verbal answers, school staff were able to look up a student in the FLO Engage system and record a response directly. Emails were sent through CVSD’s email system, such as BlackboardConnect, to ensure parents saw a recognizable email address, ensuring a high level of trust in the communications.

_{The Results}

Outreach through FLO engage resulted in a high response rate of 89 percent. Because each parents’ answers were tabulated and sorted while staying connected to specific students in CVSD’s SIS, analyzing the responses took much less time than if a workaround had to be created, manually reviewing responses and tying them to students. At the end of the day, CVSD was able to get a comprehensive understanding of which students were interested in attending the new high school, informing their enrollment balancing efforts with accurate data.

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