Washington School Information Processing Cooperative (WSIPC), a non-profit public agency located in the state of Washington, has selected a new unified technology platform that will help educators – from the district office to the classroom – engage every family with school communications and communications-based services.
In a press release, WSIPC said its Purchasing Program has selected ParentSquare to provide the new school-to-home communications platform for its participating school districts across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska.
The WSIPC Purchasing Program connects K-12 public and private schools and public agencies to a network of technology partners, and leverages the buying power of the WSIPC Cooperative to provide competitively bid goods and services at a lower cost.
“Our WSIPC Purchasing Program partners go through a rigorous review to ensure that they can provide our members with the highest quality and most relevant technology solutions at the most competitive prices,” said WSIPC’s CEO Marty Daybell.
WSIPC noted that ParentSquare’s contract with WSIPC gives 332 WSIPC Cooperative member organizations access to ParentSquare’s unified, two-way communications platform that enables them to easily contact the families of all their students, overcoming language or socioeconomic barriers while maintaining privacy and security. Families can receive alerts for school or district news, activities, and events; get notifications about progress reports, attendance, and lunch balances; complete forms and permission slips; and sign up for parent-teacher conferences; RSVP for events.
In addition to the other capabilities available to families, the new communication platform also enables school staff and parents to participate in one-to-one and group messaging with real-time language translation. ParentSquare offers translation to more than 100 languages, and app, email, text, voice, and web portal access for more equitable communications district-wide. It also features extensive integrations with student information and other critical administrative systems and single sign-on capabilities.
“We are so pleased that WSIPC chose us to help its Cooperative members improve communications equity,” said Sohit Wadhwa, CEO of ParentSquare. “The pandemic has highlighted districts’ need for better ways to connect with families. We’re grateful to WSIPC for giving us this opportunity to provide a turnkey family engagement solution.”
