With more than 15,000 students in 25 different schools in the state of Central Washington, one of our biggest goals this past school year is to build a feature-rich communication system that is the same for teachers, schools and districts. We looked at market options, talked to other districts about what they were using, and then created a new school-home communication platform for the 2021-22 school year.
One of our concerns when adopting a new platform was whether it could handle multilingual communication for the district, where our students speak eight different languages - mainly English and Spanish, so that was our only previous focus.
If you take Spanish and English out of the mix, we haven’t communicated using six other languages before, unless it’s a personal learning plan or something else that needs to be translated. We have not carried out our normal messaging in all the languages that affect our family.
We are now able to communicate with those families in their authentic language using our communication platform. It also occurs at the teacher level and then at the departmental, school and district levels. The feedback from teachers and parents about the platform’s translation capabilities has been extremely positive.
