Find the Missing Link to Future Success
A New Way to Navigate Life After High School Before it Happens
Superintendent Fred Heid is not one to shrink from the challenges of shepherding one of the largest school districts in America; instead he is known for openly acknowledging them and working with leadership to find solutions. One of those evergreen challenges is helping families and students navigate the journey to postsecondary education and post high school career options.
“Every time I speak publicly, I share this one statement: we have got to figure out how to make students and parents be partners in their education and not just passengers in their education,” he says.
That’s easier said than done, especially when the counselor to student ratio in the district is around 1:550—an improvement from several years ago, but still inadequate to meet the exhaustive demands.
Beginning this school year an innovative new technology platform is being implemented district wide with high hopes of being the missing link that proactively connects students, care givers, counselors and the local business community to each other for the purpose of providing streamlined guidance and building meaningful relationships that can help communities thrive in new ways.
SchooLinks is intricate in the sense it takes into account federal, state and local education requirements and is adaptable as the districts the company serves, but it is also as simple as a lot of the application based technology students and families use on phones, tablets and computers every day.
Students fill out an interest inventory, and the system begins showing them career options to consider. That flows into course and program offerings at their school and other schools they may attend in the future, and it helps build out a dynamic personalized dashboard that includes everything from upcoming career fairs to local businesses students could potentially job shadow or intern with in the future to universal processes related to the education process.
It is a tool that can be used by K-12 students, but is most often used by middle school and high school students at the level that matches the career and college readiness options of the district.
SchooLinks CEO Kate Fang, who founded the company nearly a decade ago, said the interface of SchooLinks is built to counteract the fact that many students feel like giving up on clarifying and chasing after post-high school dreams because they are intimidated by the process and/or they do not have adults in their lives who are familiar with the process to help them navigate it.
“You feel like it’s simple to use and there’s not much, but it’s so robust because it’s only showing students what they need to know at that specific moment in time when they need it,” Fang said recently.
For example, the platform will push messages to high schoolers and their counselors regarding asking teachers for reference letters or about next steps for financial aid applications, etc. well in advance of when the items have to be done to keep students and families on track.
Heid acknowledges the challenges school counselors face today are many and increasingly complex—especially with the cultural emphasis on social and emotional behaviors—and he believes this is a tool that will accelerate and increase their ability to do more meaningful academic counseling using technological advances.
“What SchooLinks allows us to do is it'll automate messaging to my school counselors to say, ‘Hey, Fred's off track. Here's his course schedule and this is the wrong course.’ It will keep sending a message to that counselor to remind them that they need to make that change,” Heid says.
Of course Superintendent Heid is referring to himself as a “student” but one of the greatest strengths of SchooLinks, according to Fang, is that the SchooLinks staff are essentially active “students” of each district they contract with—an ever present team of technology and systems professionals ready to run directly alongside district leaders.
“We don't only care about the implementation piece, we care about the outcome piece,” she says. “We have adopted this mindset that is just continuous development, continuous deployment. We’re not waiting for a year to deploy a change, we’re deploying next week. We want to make sure that we
are always helping our school districts solve
the most important problems.”
SchooLinks consists of roughly 150 employees, and the Austin, Tex. based company has implemented the platform with some of the country’s largest districts including Chicago Public Schools, as well as created a high-level framework for the U.S. Department of Defense.
One of the additional reasons Heid, as well as local leaders like Melody Rider, President of Lakeland Leads, are so enthusiastic about SchooLinks is because of how it will drastically improve the long-term relationship between schools and local businesses and corporations.
“The Schoolinks partner network is purposeful to let employers connect with earLy career talent in higH school by providing a structureD engagement process with k-12 institutions.”
"The SchooLinks Industry Partner Network is purpose-built to let employers connect with early career talent in high school by providing a structured engagement process with K-12 institutions,"Rider said. "SchooLinks offers a variety of workflows for companies to meet their branding and talent pipeline needs."
Businesses sign up for accounts on the platform, where they have direct communication with counselors and can share information about internships and mentorships, career fairs, events, etc.
Parents and students of many high schoolers and middle schoolers can expect to start receiving communications about signing up for SchooLinks during the first semester of the school year, but the approach will be methodical and multi-level meaning students will receive invitations at different times.
The contract for SchooLinks was approved by the School Board in August, and includes a three-year agreement that can be renewed annually.
“I think it's a game changer for our students and our families,” Heid says. “ I think the most important part of the whole thing is it starts to empower our students to really be drivers and decision makers in their own educational experience.”