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Communications director outlines website growth, ParentSquare use and chatbot pilot
Summary
The district's communications director reported rising website and social media metrics, increased ParentSquare adoption, a student-built chatbot pilot on the Mount Si site, and plans to support levy outreach with targeted mailers and video content.
Connor Laffey, the district's chief communications officer, reported metrics and new initiatives at the March 13 board meeting that show increased digital engagement and several pilot projects aimed at improving family access to information.
Laffey said the district launched a new website in 2023 and is approaching about 3 million views since launch. The communications team uses Monsido to maintain accessibility and site quality; the site quality score improved from 67% to the mid-90s after the relaunch. Social media metrics the director cited include roughly 6,800 followers across platforms and a reach of about 253,000 unique accounts; the single-post record reach cited was 24,000 for a girls cheer team story.
On ParentSquare and direct outreach, Laffey said the district newsletter has a 65% open rate; school-level open rates average about 70%; the ParentSquare mobile-app adoption rate is about 62%; and 90% of students have at least one parent registered in ParentSquare (98% excluding high school families), figures the communications office uses to plan targeted messages.
The communications office is piloting a student-built chatbot on the Mount Si High School website. Laffey said the chatbot will crawl the site and return direct answers to common questions; if it cannot answer, it will report the query back to the communications team so staff can add clarifying information to the site. "This is the first time I'll get to be in basically parents or students' heads of what they're thinking, what they're looking for when they can't find what they want," Laffey said.
Laffey also described pilot uses of AI-enabled grading assistance (a paid pilot of Brisk), classroom-management tools such as Hapara, and the StudentSquare tool for athletics. For an upcoming levy campaign the communications team plans to produce higher-quality mailers, targeted videos and podcasts and to coordinate outreach via ParentSquare and social channels.
Why this matters: higher rates of ParentSquare registration and stronger web and social metrics give the district channels to reach parents and community members for routine operations and for levy outreach. The chatbot pilot and analytics from it may guide content fixes on the website to reduce repeated information requests.
Next steps: the communications team will continue ParentSquare rollouts, complete the chatbot pilot at Mount Si, produce several videos for levy outreach and run a communications satisfaction survey (SCOPE) in June to benchmark progress against comparable districts.
