2019-2020

IMPACT REPORT

How Kinvolved Kept Students and Families Engaged Amidst an Attendance Crisis and Global Pandemic

This morning, 21 kids were absent. After KiNVOing (which took three minutes), 14 students showed up.

Principal Kimberly Leimer

Central Falls, RI

The COVID-19 Pandemic Amplified America’s Longstanding Absenteeism Crisis

Kinvolved has spent nearly a decade working to prevent and reduce absenteeism and solve the attendance crisis in the United States. This crisis is longstanding and deeply rooted; pre-pandemic, approximately 8 million, or 15% of U.S. children were missing three weeks or more of school per year, but in 2020, 25% of students were missing nationally, jumping to 40% in some communities.

Research shows that student attendance is a leading indicator of academic success, and family engagement is shown to decrease absenteeism. Because of this, our holistic approach follows a logical, research-based sequence: improve family engagement to improve attendance so that every student is set up for academic success.

While the equation is practical, many school systems haven’t invested appropriate resources into family engagement and attendance management. As a result, when COVID-19 hit, many schools were unprepared to communicate with all families regardless of language, device, internet access, and location, and they didn’t have robust attendance management systems in place to diligently and accurately keep track of their students regardless of learning scenario (in-person, remote, or hybrid).The outcomes have been horrifying, and more U.S. students were chronically absent in 2020 than any other time in recorded history.

Further, the response has largely been apathetic; instead of seeing improvements to attendance management, many systems have eliminated requirements to report attendance and/or publish inflated attendance numbers that differ from what schools report on the ground. Both approaches reconcile shortcomings by measuring engagement as attendance, but how can we count something like a single LMS login—or similarly low standard of measurement—as attendance with good conscience?

15%

of U.S. students were chronically absent in 2016

25%

of all U.S. students were chronically absent in 2020

The bottom line is that measuring engagement is not representative of attendance, and if we don’t get our students re-engaged in school immediately, we will witness an entire generation of chronically absent students lose their opportunities for personal success and prosperity. This will have a significant impact on our society and country at large in the coming decades.

It’s rare that our annual Impact Report toes the line of an op-ed tone, but we find ourselves in a unique situation. After eight years building positive relationships with districts across the country, eight years deeply entrenched in this work, eight years raising awareness and providing viable solutions, we can confidently say that this is the five-alarm fire and time is of the essence.

Consider this our call to action. Do not be silent, and do not ignore the absenteeism crisis any longer. Advocate that your district take charge making attendance THE top priority, and demand appropriate resources to do it quickly. Our students’ futures—and therefore the future of our country—are at stake.

If you’d like support, we can help.

The stories below demonstrate how our products and services have aided schools and districts to maintain and improve their family engagement and attendance work despite all of the curveballs COVID-19 threw their way in 2020.

The Students We Serve

80%

receive free and reduced price lunch

20x

are learning English

The Positive Impact of KiNVO Software

KiNVO—the leading K–12 attendance and communications software—serves as a critical lifeline for schools across the country.

Districts rely on KiNVO for a number of mission-critical tasks:

Tracking remote attendance/engagement

Communicating with students and families learning English

Coordinating meals for students receiving free and reduced meals

Cleaning parent contact data

Launching digital attendance postcards

Monitoring students’ mental health while social distancing

Surveying family needs

Supporting students with remote learning

Automating virtual and hybrid attendance digests

Facilitating secure communications oversight

These use cases had life changing impacts. Here are just a few:

— Karen Bailey, Principal,

P.S. 153

Engage 100% of Families Remotely

Karen Bailey, the Principal at P.S. 153 in Harlem, NYC, said: “Two days prior to distance learning, we successfully engaged in two-way communications with 470 out of 500 families. During the first week of distance learning, we got that list down to just one family [that we couldn’t contact].

We learned the family we couldn’t reach was in temporary housing, and the parent was 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 the KiNVO messages with our check-ins and updates. She immediately responded to confirm they were safe and explain what happened. The student has been attending class and submitting school work every day since then.”With that, P.S. 153 has open lines of communication with 100% of their students and families during remote learning—something many schools around the country struggled to do during school closures.

Learn more about how KiNVO supported NYC DOE schools in this NYC COVID-19 Case Study.

Distribute Meals Seamlessly

When the Wayne County Board of Education needed to close due to health concerns, the district team had less than 24 hours to figure out how to serve meals to students who needed them outside of their normal buildings. Using KiNVO, the Wayne County Board of Education sent out translated messages to the family contacts of students who qualified for the meals and successfully served over 4,350 breakfasts and 4,550 lunches the first day buildings were closed. This was a substantial accomplishment for a 5,000-student district in rural Georgia.

KiNVO’s custom group segmentation empowered them to send targeted messages to the families who needed the message, and KiNVO’s two-way translated text messaging ensured that all families had access to the information regardless of their language, internet access, device, or location.

Remind Students to Show Up for Class in Any Scenario

Many educators around the country experienced low attendance rates as students didn’t have the means to participate in online learning, forgot to join during their designated class time, or just neglected to log on. KiNVO helped administrators and educators overcome this challenge with custom groups, scheduled messages, and automated attendance updates.

This morning, 21 kids were absent. After KiNVOing (which took three minutes), 14 students showed up.

Principal Kimberly Leimer

Central Falls, RI

Principal Kimberly Leimer in Central Falls, RI, was one of those individuals and found KiNVO to be the most effective way to get students to show up to class; she enthusiastically shared, “This morning, 21 kids were absent. After KiNVOing (which took three minutes), 14 students showed up.”

This type of impact was seen across Kinvolved’s partner schools. In Columbia Heights Educational Campus (CHEC), Desepe DeVargas, a visual arts teacher, set up recurring messages to remind students and families about class. She said, “Students were adjusting and missing class the first couple weeks, so I set up recurring messages to go out to students just before my classes.” The automated reminders improved attendance—kids who might have forgotten they had class suddenly received a reminder to log on and followed instructions.

After class, DeVargas would send a message to the parents of the students saying it was great to see them in class, and another message to the parents of students who didn’t show up—or showed up only to quickly drop off—saying that she missed their student in class. “I had parents respond and say they thought their student attended, so it definitely helps keep them informed and hold their child accountable.”

These types of reminders and automations made it much easier for KiNVO users to improve and maintain attendance rates regardless of the learning scenario.

Break Language Barriers Via Two-Way, Texting-Based Translations

One of the biggest struggles that schools and districts faced during the pandemic was relaying vital information in a timely and accessible manner. Communications applications that require a parent login prevent families without smart devices and/or lower technological literacy from accessing the information. Additionally, messages that are only deployed in English are inaccessible to non–English speaking families, and one-way messages prevent any kind of productive discourse or platform for families to ask important questions and gain the clarity they deserve.

Since most adults in the U.S. now have a cellular phone, KiNVO sends messages as regular SMS text messages and instantly translates them into more than 80 languages. This feature makes school and district communications much more accessible than most K–12 communications applications.

In Paducah Public Schools in Kentucky, educators leveraged this feature constantly and found KiNVO to be the most effective way to keep students, families, and educators on the same page.

When asked how KiNVO worked, Chelsea Saladino, a business and marketing teacher at Paducah Tilghman High School said, “Three minutes ago, I sent out a mass message to everybody, and it went to every parent of students in my classes and all of my students,” she said. “It comes across as a text message, and I was giving a general announcement about turning things in, like labeling your work. I’ve already gotten 13 responses.”

We've definitely been able to be in contact with many more parents than we normally would. . . . We have a 60% Spanish-speaking population, and the automatic, two-way translation provides an avenue to communicate in a much easier format for our parents.

Diana Whalen

Principal, North Brunswick Township Public Schools

The automatic translation makes it so easy for our [families] that would never be able to respond . . . it's just as easy for them as our English speakers, so that's a big help.

Debbie Taylor

Teacher, Coffee County Schools

Get to the Root Causes of Absenteeism Instantly

As the health crisis swept our nation, it became increasingly important to not only know that a student was absent, but truly understand why they were absent. Being absent during COVID-19 because of a dentist appointment required a much different school response than being absent because the student was experiencing a fever. As a New Jersey school nurse explained:

"As the nurse, I keep in closer contact with the parents of kids who are absent. KiNVO has made it so easy to be in touch with parents; they respond almost immediately to texts which helps me find out why a child is absent and then refer to health care as needed. KiNVO has changed my practice at school by saving me so much time NOT having to make phone calls—sometimes I would have to make five phone calls to different people to be able to contact someone, but KiNVO changed that!"

School Nurse

North Brunswick Township Public Schools

Building Relationships — Even Remotely

As a principal during remote learning, I realized how valuable KiNVO is in that I could keep close contact with the parents through KiNVO. My relationships with parents actually improved during remote learning because I could be ‘there’ for them regularly day and night. The ease of use of the software allowed me to send pdfs to parents with the information they wanted, and we could begin a dialogue instantly through text.

From NYC Admins Impact Stories

For additional stories on how schools and districts around the country have used KiNVO to succeed during COVID-19 in 2020, take a look at the following case studies:

Washington DC
Case Study

View CASE study

PPSD
Case Study

View CASE study

Needed Innovation

As we supported districts during the pandemic, we continued to push the envelope in developing practical, research-based solutions to provide schools with even more tools to battle absenteeism.In this vein, we took on the following initiatives:

Digital Attendance Postcards

Launched a partnership with Proving Ground

We partnered with Proving Ground to co-create Digital Attendance Postcards that help districts send official attendance updates to families in a way that is faster, cheaper, and safer than sending physical postcards. Proving Ground is conducting randomized controlled trial studies in more than a dozen districts from small rural to large urban to test the effectiveness of the postcards.

Attendance Tracking

Developed custom attendance tracking for the NYC DOE

When they launched a new attendance policy in the fall of 2020 with specific codes to represent their hybrid learning model, we quickly rolled out a new tracking and reporting toolset within KiNVO, uniquely for NYC DOE schools, to save our partners hours of time every day.

Randomized Control Trial

Launched a collaborative study with the Lab @ DC, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME), and public schools in DC.

Together, we’re testing whether KiNVO helps schools positively engage families and improve student attendance. The findings will shape the district’s strategies for increasing student attendance and investing in education technology. This is Kinvolved’s first randomized control trial, and we’re excited to see the results.

You can learn more about the study here.

Data Security

Increased KiNVO’s data security and compliance.

We signed the Project Unicorn Pledge, showcasing our commitment to safe, secure interoperability. KiNVO underwent a review by New York State to ensure it meets new 2D Law security and privacy requirements for the state’s districts. These steps are critical as unchecked edtech tools may put student data at risk, particularly during increased usage of digital tools.

Professional Learning

One of the areas where many of our partner districts immediately sought support was in building capacity for digital family engagement and attendance management. With schools shifting to virtual learning—in many instances with only days notice—educators and administrators alike needed quick and practical solutions to keep students engaged.

To respond to the call at large, we created a library of free resources and conducted over 20 free professional learning sessions to help educators, leaders, and administrators overcome their most pressing challenges including:

Updating unknown or inaccurate contact information
Conducting digital home visits
Effectively managing attendance in all learning scenarios
Communicating with families about frequently updated plans
Engaging students remotely

IMPACT REPORT

This morning, 21 kids were absent. After KiNVOing (which took three minutes), 14 students showed up.