Putnam County Schools entering into a no-cost proof of concept agreement to analyze data and develop long-term solutions for student recruitment and retention.
Future Ready Coordinator Adam West said the initiative allows the district to examine analytics and correlational data to understand why students might be leaving the system. West said the opportunity arose after the district was approached at a conference and decided to form a team to explore the idea.
“With ThoughtExchange, one of the things that has concerned us, as it should all educators and systems, is what to do to meet the needs of the current students and the students who have left,” West said. “Why have you left? What are some things that are maybe that they had in common, the students that left, whether it be behavior, whether it be they were in clubs, whether they were maybe behind on credits, maybe they were high-flyers, maybe we weren’t meet that need, maybe it was on either side of the spectrum.”
West said the district has seen a decrease in enrollment, including the loss of over 100 students at certain schools. West said the project aims to be a proactive approach to creating opportunities that retain current students and recruit those who may be unaware of the district’s diverse offerings.
“We’re looking at something that not only will meet what currently has happened, but really to be more of a proactive approach to what will happen and see if there’s something that we’re doing that we can do differently to really kind of create opportunities for the students that are here, as far as, retaining them, and recruiting the students that maybe they didn’t know we were doing this and maybe there’s just opportunities that not everybody’s aware of,” West said.
West said the district prioritized student privacy by reviewing contracts line-by-line to ensure a data privacy agreement was in place before moving forward. West said the analysis will compare the characteristics of students who have left the system with the current student body to identify shared needs or concerns.
“If we could survey them directly, that would obviously be beneficial that they could just say, hey listen, this is—we left because XYZ,” West said. “That may not be the case, because they’re no longer our students. But the students who are currently here, now we can take that correlational data and say, all right, what do we have in our current student makeup that we need to make sure that we address that these kids may be in the same boat of thinking the same things as potentially this and may not know the opportunities that, you know, we keep preaching about that we have a ton of opportunities for students to be educated to meet the needs of their talents, of their skill sets, of all the things as far as what future-ready students would look like.”
West said the findings could influence how the district addresses attendance, behavior issues, and the promotion of flexible instruction models. West said the district plans to wait until students return for the fall session to begin gathering data and generating reports.
“It’s not going to do anybody, any good unless we can figure out a way to act upon it,” West said. “So creating the data’s one part, creating the strategic plan behind it, uh, is going to be the next step. And we’re willing to act because as a school system we know that this is a pivotal point in the educational arena.”
West said the success of the proof of concept will be determined through deep conversations regarding how the data can be applied to the school system’s strategic plan.