Updated for 2025, ParentSquare’s Buyer’s Guide and Funding Guide Help Educators Select and Find Funds for a School-Home Communication Platform

Santa Barbara, CA—Jan. 20, 2025—To help educators seeking to fund a unified family engagement platform, ParentSquare is releasing updated versions of two popular resources, “Choosing a Communication Platform for School-Home Engagement: A Buyer’s Guide” and “Funding Guide: Navigating Resources for Improving Family Engagement.” These two guides provide up-to-date advice and best practices for navigating the different priorities and budgetary constraints educators face when selecting a new school-home communication platform.

“Family engagement is essential for student success, driving higher attendance rates, graduation rates, academic progress, and better mental health. And effective and equitable school-home communication is the basis for family engagement,” said ParentSquare President and Founder Anupama Vaid. “We’ve updated these two guides to help administrators, teachers, and staff members select the right communication platform for them—one that’s compatible with their specific needs and workflows, easy to use, and successfully reaches all students and families.”

The 12-page buyer’s guide, “Choosing a Communication Platform for School-Home Engagement,” helps readers clarify their communication needs and evaluate prospective vendors. The guide is divided into five sections. The first four sections address the following questions:

1. How many tools does your district use for communication?
2. What is the communication experience like for your families?
3. How do you support equitable communication?
4. Can you protect and manage your district’s data?

The fifth section, titled “Questions for Vendors,” contains a comprehensive checklist that readers can use to evaluate a current or prospective communications platform to ensure it meets your community’s needs.

The 14-page “Funding Guide: Navigating Resources for Improving Family Engagement” specifies how ParentSquare aligns with the following funding sources:

• ESSA Title I, Title II, Title III, and Title IV funding criteria
• Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) Education Program
• State plan chronic absenteeism prevention goals

Readers will learn the purposes for which these different sources were created, stipulations for using the funds, and how ParentSquare aligns with those stipulations.

“Navigating Resources” also includes a section with strategic advice for using ParentSquare to offset costs and replace multiple tools and applications. That section features a brief case study that explains how one California school district used the platform’s Secure Document Delivery feature to save $32,000 in postage costs alone.

The guide’s final two sections provide suggestions for sharing platform costs across departments and the next steps that readers can take. “When educators streamline school-home communication and optimize communication costs, they enhance their ability to build and sustain a positive school climate,” said Vaid. “These updated guides are part of our commitment to helping educators and schools do their best for students and families.”

“Choosing a Communication Platform for School-Home Engagement: A Buyer’s Guide” can be downloaded at: https://www.parentsquare.com/buyers-guide/

“Funding Guide: Navigating Resources for Improving Family Engagement” is available at: https://www.parentsquare.com/engage/funding-guide/

About ParentSquare

ParentSquare is the leading provider of digital family and community engagement solutions for K-12 institutions, serving over 20 million students across all 50 states. Districts rely on ParentSquare’s unified platform for mass notifications, classroom communications, school websites, translation in 190+ languages, and other everyday parent interactions. Seamless integrations with existing school information systems (SIS) easily connects schools with families to advance communication equity and impact student success. Founded in 2011, ParentSquare has experienced over 500% growth in the last three years. Explore how they are shaping the future of school-to-home communications at parentsquare.com.

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