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District outlines upgrades to student information and family communication systems
Summary
Cleveland City Schools staff described a shift to PowerSchool-based tools — including PowerSchool Messenger, TalkingPoints integration, PowerSchool forms and My PowerHub — aiming to centralize student data, streamline reporting and expand multilingual, two-way communication with families.
Cleveland City Schools staff told the board the district is consolidating student information and parent-communication systems to improve data accuracy, state reporting and family outreach.
Michael Cars, director of student information, summarized the department’s responsibilities and recent work. Cars said the district stores about 3,000,000,000 "pieces of data" in PowerSchool and that the district uses PowerSchool and add-on analytics tools to accelerate state reporting, assessments and internal dashboards that help principals and teachers monitor enrollment, attendance and behavior trends.
Cars described several product changes and pilots:
• PowerSchool Messenger: replacing the district’s previous one-way broadcast system for voice, text and email; Cars said the district has roughly 12,000 contacts (about 7,000 students and 1,000 staff) in the system and has used the service to send more than 2,000,000 messages so far.
• TalkingPoints (two-way translation): Cars said the district is piloting an integrated two-way system that translates messages into the parent’s preferred language and translates replies back to staff. He described the platform as useful for families without mobile apps and said conversations are archived for recordkeeping.
• PowerSchool forms: replacing the district’s legacy PowerSchool enrollment form with a more flexible system to collect student and parent data during summer updates and future new-student onboarding.
• My PowerHub (parent portal): Cars showed a preview of a consolidated parent portal that centralizes tiles, dashboards and translated content so parents do not have to navigate complex menus.
Cars also described analytics and assessment work, including a PowerSchool Insights dashboard the district uses to model state report-card data. When board member Renee Diamond asked about the accuracy of the district’s anticipatory graphs, Cars said the state returns results in a CDF file, and the district typically has preliminary data “a month or a month and a half” before the state’s public release; he cautioned the models follow a complex set of rules and occasionally require adjustments.
Board members who spoke praised the work and asked technical questions about accuracy, translation coverage and automation. Cars said most products support roughly 30 languages and that future work would focus on automation of manual processes.
The board did not take formal action on this presentation; Cars was asked to continue implementation planning and report back as pilots expand.
