School districts everywhere must contend with the reality of declining budgets and rising expectations. It is a fantasy to expect better results from fewer people who are working in the same system and using the same outdated tools.
Something Must Change
School districts, facing unprecedented budget cuts, are cutting deep. Most are finding that staff reductions are painful but unavoidable. The pain of those reductions is going to be felt far beyond those directly impacted. It will be felt by the millions of students and their families, who face the loss of vital services and programs, and by those still employed by the system, who will find no reduction in expectations.
In some industries, when companies are confronted with these circumstances, they either undergo significant structural change or they fail. School districts, however, are not companies. They can't simply go bankrupt. And if school districts are engineered to do anything well, it's to resist structural change.
Change the Code, Change the Culture
One thing is obvious: districts must get maximum value from people and systems, and look wherever possible for additional support systems that they do not need to fund. Cross-functional teams, outsourcing, and pushing work downstream outside the organization are now standard features of the enterprise, made possible by technology. Been to an ATM recently? If you go to Bank of America and deposit a check, you now scan it in yourself, rather than a bank employee doing the same work. At Starbucks, the server now pours you a cup of coffee, and you do the rest at the fixin's bar.
Imagine a world in which students publish homework rather than teachers, in which the entry of a single grade by a teacher can trigger an intervention by a coach, in which city social systems that support students and families can interact easily with the teachers of the students they help. You just imagined what School Loop does today.
Organized around the idea that student-centric teams, rather than individuals, are best able to keep students in school and on track, School Loop gives districts an information architecture that maximizes transparency and team interaction, leverages content, allows the district to redefine boundaries to get the most out of external support services, and, where possible, puts the students to work.
Software is not the only answer -- not by a long shot. But software can express a vision about how schools could operate differently without wildly disruptive and expensive change. That's what we do. At a minimum, we can save districts the money being wasted on bloated, frilly websites that serve no real purpose other than to allow website vendors to siphon off a portion of credit card payments by parents. School Loop Standard is free. Better, we can help you help your staff, get the most out of all resources available to you, and, in the face of so many roadblocks, help you keep kids in school and on track.