Stafford Municipal School District

Stafford MSD: 99.3% Contactability™ across five campuses, and dignity for every family

Location

Stafford, TX

Type

District of 5 campuses, PK–12

Students

3,532 students

One coordinator, five campuses, 3,532 students 

Verlincia Prince spent the morning gathering bags of clothing for students at Stafford’s early childhood campus. She sat down afterward and sent one message that arrived for six families individually.

“Hey, I’m Ms. Prince. I just want you to know that I’m sending your babies home with some uniforms and some hygiene items. If these don’t work, send me a message and we’ll get them taken care of.”

Prince is Stafford’s Parent, Family and Community Engagement Coordinator, though the title covers only part of the job. She supports communications for all five campuses and is the point person for students who qualify under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.

Of Stafford’s 3,532 students, 75.1% are economically disadvantaged, 24.2% are English learners, and roughly 81 are experiencing homelessness, even so, the district holds an average daily attendance rate above 94%. Before ParentSquare, each campus used its own communication tools, so no administrator had a view of the whole district, or was able to support personal outreach at this scale.

“A letter would get sent home, but a lot of those families are moving so much that they don’t ever get it,” Prince said. “And nobody was picking up the phone to make the phone call.”

Finding out what’s actually keeping a student home

When a student misses one or two days of school, Prince receives a notification. The first message she sends isn’t a compliance letter, but a direct message.

“Hey, we miss seeing you. You’ve been out a couple days, I’m just following up. What’s going on?”

The answers she gets back are rarely about attendance.

“Sometimes they tell me that they didn’t have clean clothes. I’ll say, ‘Okay, let me help you with laundry,'” Prince said. “Or if they say, ‘We had to move,’ let me figure out how to get you transportation. It’s usually something life-altering, not because they don’t want to be at school, but because there’s a barrier in the way.”

She can also see when a message is delivered and read. In a district where phone numbers change often, this is the difference between outreach and guesswork.

Reaching families in the language they speak

As a Title I school district, Stafford needs to provide information to families in a language they can understand. But without dedicated translation resources, providing multilingual support was difficult to do at scale.

With ParentSquare, Prince said, the district has been able to close that gap in both directions. “They can type in their home language, and we get their message in a language that we understand.”

For Prince, being responsive to families’ needs and preferences has been crucial for shifting communication from delivery to engagement. “It’s not just sending something and hoping that they read it,” she said. “Now, we’re giving them a chance to ask us questions that we can respond to.”

Putting a device in every student’s hand

Stafford is a 1:1 iPad district, so StudentSquare is available on student devices from grades 3 through 12. For students without cell service, including the unaccompanied minors that Prince supports directly, the district-issued device is how they reach an adult. With this line of communication, students at one middle school now message their principal to ask what they need to do to qualify for Wellness Day, an incentive the school offers to students who finish a six-week period without a tardy or a discipline referral.

“They’re keeping their principal abreast of what’s going on with them because they truly want to be engaged,” Prince said.

Serving families with dignity 

When Prince identifies a family who qualifies under McKinney-Vento, she adds them to a private group in ParentSquare that allows her to message the group without revealing other recipients, and lets families respond to her privately as well. This level of sensitivity changes what she can offer, as well as how it’s received.

“If we have air mattresses donated, I can send a message saying ‘If anybody needs one, please let me know,’ and they’ll message me,” she said. “They don’t have to come to the office and feel like a charity case. It’s something very private. Nobody has to know.”

Prince uses the same group to connect families with community partners, including groceries through East Fort Bend Human Needs Ministry. The same was true when Soles4Souls donated 135 pairs of new shoes, which reached the students who needed them without anyone else knowing.

“I would not be able to do this work efficiently any other way,” she said.

As a Stafford MSD parent, I am truly grateful for the way McKinney-Vento reached out to me privately when my family was going through a very difficult time. As a mother, it is not easy to talk about your struggles or ask for help, but being contacted privately made me feel comfortable enough to be honest without feeling embarrassed or judged. I was just trying my best to keep my children safe, stable, and in school, and knowing that someone cared enough to reach out and help us meant more to me than they probably realize. The support helped my family during a time when we really needed it, and I will always be thankful for that kindness and understanding.

Winning over the rest of the district 

Prince met resistance when she first made the case for ParentSquare. “I got a lot of pushback at the beginning, because change is hard,” she said. “But I explained all of the benefits of the platform to my colleagues.” What moved staff was not just the family outreach, it was everything else the district could run through one unified platform.

Stafford’s business office was dedicated to another platform, and came around to ParentSquare Pay once it saw that payments could carry a budget code. Reconciling summer school tuition had been manual work, and the team was surprised by how easily it could now run a report and trace a payment back to its source. Prince is now working to retire the district’s separate payment tool entirely.

Documents move through the platform too. Permission slips go out as forms, and report cards and other records tied to a student ID go through Secure Document Delivery. For families who move frequently, a report card mailed home may never arrive, but when it goes out through ParentSquare, it reaches the account a parent already checks.

Recordkeeping is a separate advantage, and it is the one Stafford’s superintendent acted on. When the district received a public information request covering every communication about a single student, the full record was in ParentSquare.

Accessing the record took a single request. “If it ever comes to your word against theirs, we can pull it up,” Prince said. “We can see the timestamps. We have that oversight.”

That visibility is why the superintendent set a districtwide expectation that family and student communication runs through ParentSquare rather than personal phones or outside apps. It also gives Prince room to extend access carefully. She adds PTO parents as staff members with adjusted permissions, so they can reach the families they work with while the district maintains a clear view of all communications. 

The platform is also how Stafford MSD listens. Inspired by a survey vendor another district used, Prince began running her own parent surveys through ParentSquare. She asks the kind of questions a parent can answer in a moment, like whether they felt welcome in the front office or whether they have been able to reach their child’s teacher. The anonymous responses become evidence for the district and campus improvement plans, and for Title I documentation.

Prince asks families to be candid. “We want to do better,” she said. “Sometimes the feedback hurts. But we need it.”

Each of these uses points back to the same thing. The more the district runs through one platform, the less of Prince’s day goes to administrative work, and the more of it she can spend serving the families who need her.

“It’s not a checkbox”

Asked what best practices she would share with other districts serving families like hers, Prince emphasized treating communication as an investment into the students and families she supports. 

“This is a way to serve our families with dignity and a way for them to communicate, even when they don’t have a cell phone,” she said. “It is a priceless investment, not a checkbox. Communication with ParentSquare has the human touch, which is what we’re here to do for our babies.”