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The value of parental involvement on student achievement is clear. Multitudes of studies and research findings repeatedly show the strong correlation between the degree of a parent’s involvement with their child’s education and success in the classroom. The Harvard Family Research Project, an advocacy organization based out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is an ardent supporter of policies and initiatives promoting greater family involvement in schools. Many schools are going to extreme lengths to institute programs encouraging and increasing parental involvement within their districts.

At Blackboard, we take pride in providing reliable technology solutions to enhance learning and teaching within K-12 schools and districts across the country. So, we’re delighted to see a handful of our clients named as the Top School Districts in Digital Technology. Over the past seven years, the e.Republic’s Center for Digital Education and the National School Boards Association have teamed up in issuing the Digital School District survey to all U.S. public schools for recognizing exemplary school boards and district’s use of technology to govern the district, communicate with students, parents and the community and to improve district operations. Based on the survey responses, the school districts were ranked according to their fullest implementation of technology for continuing digital education evolution.

Mass Notification Event No Match for Blackboard Connect Capacity

Last week, millions of California residents participated in the Great California ShakeOut, an annual drill to promote emergency preparedness in the event of an earthquake. More than 7.8 million people across California registered to take part in the event, which happened at 10:21 a.m. on Oct. 21.

Many schools, campuses and municipalities rely on Blackboard Connect for communicating during critical situations. On Thursday we helped send out more than 1.12 million messages for the ShakeOut event, including:

• More than 75,000 multimodal messages sent in K-12 schools and districts
• More than 800,000 messages distributed at colleges and universities.
• More than 700,000 messages to residents in cities, towns and counties.

The Blackboard Connect team is traveling to San Jose this week to participate in the 96^th annual ICMA (International City/County Management Association) conference. Kicking off on Sunday, October 17, ICMA is hosting more than 2,000 local government representatives to present on topics related to this year’s theme, Local Government 2.0: Innovative Applications for Extraordinary Times and Beyond. Presentations and sessions will showcase new, available technologies and practices designed specifically to serve and benefit municipalities.

This week we joined K-12 schools and districts in celebrating National School Lunch week. The initiative, as sponsored by the School Nutrition Association and the Milk Processors Education Program, was created to increase awareness of and garner support for healthy, nutritious lunches in schools across the country.  As National School Lunch week comes to an end, schools and districts can dramatically improve their school lunch programs throughout the year with better food options, while also instituting a system for efficient management.

School lunch programs feed 31 million children nationwide with 95 percent of schools participating. With so many children to feed, schools and districts benefit from having a system to effectively communicate about school lunch balances, menu updates or options and other program reminders. In the past year, schools and districts using Blackboard mass notification services have sent out more than one million messages concerning school lunches.