Success Story: South Central Human Resource Agency – Tennessee -

Data-Driven Family Engagement Tools for Head Start and State Preschools

Learning Genie is an app for ECE educators and family service workers for Distant Learning and Family Engagement including tracking in-kind. During the COVID-19 crisis, Learning Genie offers free tools till the end of 2020 under a grant (or in-kind) to support all ECE agencies for Distance Learning and track school readiness outcomes.

PRESCHOOL PORTFOLIO APP- LEARNING GENIE

Learning Genie also provides a useful application for portfolio-building. The portfolio tracking and tagging systems could be readily applied to DRDP 2015, Florida VPK, Head Start (HS), Early Head Start (EHS), Montessori, and other state or private-backed assessment tools.

Success Story

South Central Human Resource Agency - Tennessee

South Central Human Resource Agency (TN) provides children from low-income families in 13 counties with education through both Head Start and Early Head Start. SCHRA’s HS and EHS mission is to provide comprehensive high-quality services to educate children, empower families and engage communities.

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Family Engagement Goals

Family Engagement Challenges

SCHRA struggled with reaching their non-English and English-speaking families in a way that the families were most comfortable and responsive to. SCHRA was seeking a modernized way to inform the families with updates about their children, as well as what was going on in their program. One reason this was difficult for SCHRA was due to the families’ phone numbers constantly changing throughout the school year.

With our program, they have the capability to reach ALL of their families through our 2-way chat, which has an auto-translation feature for 104 different languages. The staff and families are able to have a direct way to communicate with one another about updates on their children and anything that needs to be communicated immediately. These messages are received on the parents’ phones through the Learning Genie app, which is not tied to specific phone numbers and specific mobile devices.

Results

Non-English-speaking family engagement

These families have been receiving interactive and personalized content through Learning Genie in their native language. They are also sending and receiving automatically translated messages, allowing them to engage with their child’s teacher.

2-way communication

There have been 235 messages sent between staff and families. Staff and families have been able to easily update each other, ask questions needing immediate response, and simply communicate directly with one another.

Reaching more families

120 of their 174 children have at least one family member signed up, which equates to about 69% of their families. An average of about 100 parents logged into the app each month, which amounts to about 83% of onboarded families logging in and engaging each month. 

Highlights

Family Engagement Dashboard

Here is a screenshot of their agency’s family engagement dashboard, where administrators can see which engagement items are resonating well with families, and where to improve.

“I just had to create the event and BOOM it was done. Very easy and less stressful.”

“Our parents were able to see their children in their natural school habitat when the teachers took pictures... I know that having those random ‘look at little Johnny reading a book’ pictures make the parents' day much better (especially if their child is prone to crying at drop off).”

Family Partner, Moore County Head Start
Laura Campos, Multicultural Specialist l.campos@schra.us 931.215.3484