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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the Learning Genie was introduced to me, I was very excited about sharing with the parents what I was teaching to the children on a more personable level. One of the most valuable features that I used was taking photos of the children doing activities and being able to send the pictures electronically to the parents on a daily basis. The parents were very excited each day to receive their email and see what their child had learned. The parents would use information we provided on a daily basis and talk about what they learned at school. This was a great conversation starter. Most children would come home from school and ask their child what they learned at school today and most would say “nothing I just played”. With the daily information I found that the children showed what they learned at school sometimes teaching their parents some things.