Sioux Falls Schools District

SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA    |    25,000 STUDENTS

Download the report

Rolling out a solution in stages leads to across-the-board attendance improvement.

Read more in our report
Dr Brian Maher

–Dr. Brian Maher, Superintendent
Sioux Falls School District

Founded in 2012, Kinvolved™ is a social enterprise on a mission to boost student attendance and tackle chronic absenteeism by engaging educators, families, and communities through a combination of technology tools and in-person interventions.

In Fall 2017, Kinvolved launched a four-school partnership with Sioux Falls School District, a South Dakota school system serving twenty-five thousand students. The pilot unrolled in four stages, broken up by quarter year:

”Realizing the high correlation between attendance and academic achievement, the Sioux Falls School District is excited to partner with KiNVO to drive higher attendance. KiNVO offers an innovative platform to increase communication with parents and provide administrators with effective tools to better manage attendance, and the Kinvolved team have been responsive and engaged partners. We increased attendance levels at all four pilot schools during this past year, and we look forward to continuing to leverage this partnership and raising the achievement levels at our schools

Dr. Brian MaherSuperintendent, Sioux Falls School District
  1. Engage with Kinvolved’s professional services team through strategy and information sessions to identify attendance needs and pain points; set up KiNVO™ to address the district’s primary objectives.
  2. Conduct a needs assessment and understanding of barriers to student attendance.
  3. Launch KiNVO’s two-way, translated messaging tool to engage families.
  4. Roll out of KiNVO’s attendance-focused features; send attendance digests to families; conduct strategic interventions with target students.

”My goal is to bridge all gaps with families. It’s important to make parents feel special, and KiNVO makes it easy to do that. We personalize messages to include students’ names, and send customized reminders to attend parent events. As a result, parents who were once disengaged now feel like our school is home—we’ve seen a huge increase in attendance at our Fall parent-teacher conferences. These relationships support us when we need to have difficult conversations—we are a true partner to our families in these circumstances, not a consequence.

Jayne Zeilinski Principal, Sioux Falls

As a result of careful planning and a staged rollout, every pilot school increased attendance rates.

Over the course of a single quarter:

Hawthorne Elementary increased attendance rates by 2.5 percent

Hayward Elementary increased attendance rates by 1 percent

Whittier Middle increased attendance rates by 0.5 percent

Laura B. Anderson increased attendance rates by 2.6 percent

In addition, because the pilot prioritized positive engagement, every school experienced positive shifts in their relationships with families. As schools increased their KiNVO usage, communication with parents increased by approximately 200 percent.