With more than 15,000 students across 25 different schools in central Washington state, one of our biggest goals coming into this past school year was to develop a feature-rich communications system that was the same for teachers, schools, and the district. We looked at the options on the market, talked to other districts about what they are using, and then put in a new school-home communications platform in place for the 2021-22 school year.
One of our concerns when adopting a new platform was whether it could handle multilingual communications for the district, where our students speak eight different languages–mainly English and Spanish, so that was our previous sole focus.
If you take Spanish and English out of the mix, we’ve never communicated using the six other languages before, unless it was an Individual Education Plan or something else that had to be translated. We’ve never communicated our normal messaging out in ALL languages that impact our families.
We’re now able to communicate with those families using our communications platform in their authentic language. This happens at the teacher level and then also at the department, school, and district level. Teacher and parent feedback on the platform’s translation capabilities has been extremely positive.
Author Recent PostsKirsten Fitterer, Chief Communications Officer, Yakima School DistrictKirsten Fitterer is Chief Communications Officer at Yakima School District in Yakima, Wash. Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)
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