2014 was a great year for us at SchoolPad. Taking our mission forward we helped more than a dozen K-12 Schools improve their levels of parental involvement by keeping parents more informed and involved with their child’s progress at School.
To quantify the impact we thought of pulling out some numbers from year 2014 to get an insight on how things worked and also get some hints on the scope of improvement to do even better this year. As a part of this activity we started digging our data and started pulling out the number of working Parents who used SchoolPad because that’s where we felt the need of Parental involvement becomes more prominent compared to a single working parent.
Though the occupation related data for most parents was missing being an optional data field, but we still managed to get a sample of around 1200 working Parents, which was enough for us to get started. The next obvious step was to find the number of connections these Parents made with their child’s School. A connection here basically meant to be either some piece of information about the child shared by the School and consumed successfully by the parent or a conversation between the Parent and the school staff.
We were thrilled to see the numbers and I am excited to share that we helped more than 1200 working parents to connect to their child’s School for more than 4 Lakh 38 thousand times in year 2014. What that means is that every working parent out of these 1200 was able to connect to their child’s school for at least once every day including non working days.
These numbers were really exciting for us but to add to our excitement, just after a few days of pulling out these numbers, we received a jaw-dropping message from one of the Parents using SchoolPad. A mother wrote to us and explained the power of parental involvement and engagement with a real incident of her daughter and it was so touching that we couldn’t stop ourselves from sharing it with the world.
My daughter is studying in Grade 2 now and I would like to share an incident, which happened when she was in KG. There was a contest happening in School called “Community helpers” and students had to select one community helper and speak on it.
I received a SMS from the school one day before the event and me and my husband started preparing her for it. We suggested options like Doctor, Engineer etc but since I am myself into research she wanted to become a Scientist. I was not so satisfied and hence thought on it in more detail. Suddenly I shouted
HOUSEMAID
My daughter cried, no mom, I will not act as a housemaid. I will not act like sweeping floors and washing clothes and so at this point we didn’t force her and advised her to do whatever she likes.
In the night, during story time, I told her about my housemaid and her contributions in our life, about her tough life and hard work. Now in the morning while getting ready for the School she shouted. Mom, I will act as a housemaid but please help me prepare those 6 lines we prepared last night. The lines were like this.
Hello Friends, I am a housemaid, you might have seen me sweeping floors, washing clothes and doing other household activities but remember no woman can be a doctor, scientist, engineer or any other successful person without my help. This is me who takes care of their kids and home. So respect my profession and me. On that day she realised that no profession is big or small and we should respect everyone irrespective of his/her profession. She won the first prize.
I would like to thank her teachers for giving importance to moral values and SchoolPad for keeping us in sync with all School related updates.
Now try to run this piece of text through your mind and think of how a small piece of SMS which was consumed by the parent at the right time created a moment that the Parents not only got involved but engaged themselves to such a level that the child at this tender age was able to understand such an important message of life. Now that’s the power of parental involvement and engagement.
