Article
California school’s visitor registration system makes parents feel at home
To create an environment that encourages community participation and immediately makes everyone feel at home, LEAD Elementary School in California adopted an iPad-based visitor registration system from Envoy in October 2015.
Encouraging parent participation is difficult for many schools, and LEAD Elementary School’s bilingual, predominantly Hispanic community adds its own level of complication.
The school’s unique challenge is encouraging families to participate in their child’s education. Some parents, however, may not feel comfortable speaking English, or come from a culture where questioning teachers isn’t the norm.
To create an environment that encourages community participation and immediately makes everyone feel at home, Pattie Dullea, the school’s principal, adopted an iPad-based visitor registration system from Envoy in October 2015.
“As a digital, forward-thinking school, we care immensely about engaging with our community — and Envoy helps us to do that perfectly,” said Dullea.
The front desk is LEAD’s first point of contact with its native Spanish-speaking families. LEAD took advantage of the system’s internationalization feature to display the check-in system in Spanish. This means parents, grandparents and caretakers feel at ease and personally welcomed, Denora Smith, the school’s receptionist, says.
The visitor registration setup also ensures visitor information is recorded in one place. It helps LEAD’s receptionists learn the visitors’ names and greet them warmly on return visits.
LEAD also uses the product’s badge feature to automatically print visitor badges. Badges help faculty spot visitors on campus and personally say hello, making visitors feel like the whole school knows their name.
Another way the product is helping the school is with its Parent Involvement Project (PIP), which encourages parents to volunteer at LEAD.
The program’s funding is conditional on parent participation. “Our donor needs to see that parents are coming in and participating in PIP for the program to continue,” Erin DeMartini says. Demartini formerly served as the school’s Teacher on Special Assignment.
The system has been crucial for helping the school pull records on parent participation in PIP, demonstrating the program’s strong draw. “With Envoy, we can easily print a report on the number of participants at a PIP event, as well as how many hours our parents spent in each classroom,” DeMartini explains.
“This saves us so much time. Before Envoy, we’d make photocopies of the paper sign-in sheets and manually enter the data. We no longer have to decipher chicken scratch to figure out people’s names,” DeMartini says. Envoy’s digital visitor record ensures that everyone’s names are collected — nothing slips through the cracks.
Envoy: www.envoy.com.
