Case Study: Yakima School District achieves multilingual, two-way family communications with ParentSquare

Washington State School District Uses ParentSquare for Multilingual Communications

Yakima School District needed a feature-rich, two-way communications platform to better engage all parents, secondary students, and its community, particularly to overcome multilingual barriers. The district, serving 15,000 students who speak eight different languages, previously struggled with low contactability and one-way messaging. They selected the ParentSquare school-home communication platform to address this challenge.

Implementing ParentSquare enabled the district to send and receive messages directly translated into multiple languages, dramatically improving family engagement. The vendor's solution also allowed for targeted messaging for departments like transportation and automated attendance notifications. As a result, the district's family contactability rate increased from 60 percent to an impressive 97 percent, and they achieved their goal of facilitating two-way communication between speakers of different languages.

Yakima School District

Kirsten Fitterer

Chief Communications Office