CoderZ Names Tony Oran as Chief Executive Officer

DERRY, N.H. – CoderZ, the award-winning, gamified, cloud-based robotics and STEM platform, has announced that Tony Oran is joining the company as its CEO in the USA.

Oran has extensive experience in sales, marketing as well as business leadership and development. He comes to CoderZ from Festo Didactic, the technical education equipment and solution provider where he held several executive positions, most recently vice president of sales for the company’s North America division. Before that, Oran was also director of strategic business development and partnerships.

Previously, Oran held multiple management roles at Festo Didactic’s parent company Festo Group, a worldwide supplier of automation technology, equipment, and solutions for industrial and technical education. Before Festo, he served as an operations leader for various companies.…Read More

Ransomware attacks on schools are only getting worse

Just a few years ago, ransomware probably didn’t rank very high on a list of things parents regularly talked about. But the odds are getting higher that if you ask a parent about it now, they’ll have plenty to say.

Fourteen percent of parents of school-age children in the U.S. responded to a recent survey saying that they had experienced a ransomware attack on their kids’ school. That number was just 9 percent a year ago. The rate of attacks appears to be growing, with a higher percentage of parents saying it happened last summer or this school year, compared to those who experienced it the year before.

Criminals attacked school districts in Tucson, Arizona, and Nantucket, Massachusetts, in late January, cancelling classes for one district and sending administrators to work from home at the other. The attacks marked the fourth and fifth publicly-disclosed incidents in January alone, although survey data indicates that schools may be getting targeted at a higher rate than that, and some incidents may simply not be getting disclosed.…Read More

Federal COVID relief funding will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

For the past couple of years, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has been able to tap its share of federal COVID relief aid to fund after-school enrichment programs that help students recover from learning lost during the pandemic.

But those funds will soon run out, and Detroit and other districts face some tough decisions about which programs and employees they can afford to keep once federal support is gone. …Read More

5 ways video improves school-home communication

Increasingly, district leaders are incorporating video into school-home communication. Many districts that tried video options out of necessity during the pandemic are seeing the benefits that video can provide for parent engagement and are expanding video options even as schools are back to in-person instruction.

Districts are finding that using video can improve school-home communication by making the process of engagement easier for parents. Video options can help with:

  • Removing barriers to school-home communication.
  • Providing educators with real-time connections with students’ families without the hassles of gathering everyone in the same location.
  • Reaching parents who might be hard to engage otherwise. If a parent is working two jobs, doesn’t have access to transportation, or would have other barriers to coming to an in-person meeting, a video call can make the process easier for a parent.
  • An overall shift in individuals’ behaviors and technological skills to rely on video tools.

Here are five tips for school leaders who want to incorporate video into their school-home communication strategies.…Read More

Parents are turning to schools for student mental health

School counselors and social workers, teachers, and administrators have always been integral to a parent’s support network. This is particularly true for children who struggle in class and have trouble accessing their curriculum.  Collaborative communication between a school and parents is critical for ensuring positive student outcomes.

Although clearly an issue before the pandemic, the pandemic has increased our collective awareness of children’s mental health issues and schools’ role in addressing those challenges. At the height of the pandemic, we were aware of the toll that the effects of the pandemic were taking on the nation’s school children, but we were functioning in a survival mode. As we emerge from this survival mode, it is clear that our school-age children are in crisis.

According to an October 30, 2022, Wall Street Journal article, “A mental-health crisis among children and teens that had been brewing for years worsened as routines were disrupted in the pandemic and many kids faced isolation and loss.”…Read More

3 ways schools play a vital role in community safety

Schools do so much for a community. They provide a safe place for children to learn and grow each day, filled with educators who truly care. However, as a parent or educator, it’s important to understand that many schools aren’t being used to their full potential.

When utilized properly, local schools can uplift safety in your community, providing a place outside of traditional school hours for children and families to feel secure and supported.

The task of neighborhood safety shouldn’t fall solely on teachers and administrators. However, these individuals who have regular contact with local youth can spearhead the initiatives that promote safety in the community.…Read More

SchoolStatus Names New Chief Revenue Officer and Expands Sales Team to Build on its Continued Growth

RIDGELAND, Miss., August 10, 2022 /PRNewswire/ —  SchoolStatus, a leading provider of an education communications platform designed to improve student outcomes through data and parent engagement, today announced that it has strengthened its leadership and sales teams with the appointment of Phil Charland as the Company’s first chief revenue officer (CRO), and the expansion of its U.S. sales team. In this newly-created role, Charland will be responsible for global sales, marketing, and customer success for SchoolStatus. 

Charland is an accomplished educational technology executive with over 15 years of experience building and leading high-performing global sales, customer success, and revenue enablement and operations teams. Most recently, he led Ascend Learning’s Safety and Security global sales teams as Vice President of Sales, with a focus across K12, higher education, and professional learning markets. Prior to Ascend Learning, Charland led national and global sales teams for numerous leading education companies including Edmentum, Ellevation Education, Renaissance Learning, and Eduventures, LLC. Charland started his career in education as a K12 teacher and athletic director at The American School In Switzerland, where he taught for three years. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University 

“This is a very exciting time for SchoolStatus as we scale to address rapidly increasing demand for unified K12 analytics, communications, and workflow platforms,” said Russ Davis, founder and CEO of SchoolStatus. “We believe Phil’s extensive experience in sales and marketing strategy and his track record of driving business growth for education technology companies make him an ideal candidate to help us continue to accelerate our growth trajectory.” …Read More

How our district established a unified communication platform

With 3,300 students across three different schools, our district was using a variety of diverse applications for school-to-home communications. They all handled separate aspects of our teacher-parent communications, but they weren’t cohesive.

We started looking for a new solution in 2019 that would consolidate the multiple, disparate tools into one platform and then quickly kicked that effort into high gear at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

After speaking with other districts about their experiences using school-home communication platforms, and taking our own technology director’s recommendation to heart, we decided to implement ParentSquare. We put together a core group of people that would be using the new communications technology we adopted in order to assess how well it would work for their teams and respective buildings.…Read More