Pearl River County School District

Pearl River County School District: Reaching 100% of families and going cashless on one platform

Location

Carriere, MS

Type

Rural District of 4 schools

Students

3,300

Pearl River County School District sits about an hour north of New Orleans and serves 3,300 students across four schools. Before ParentSquare, school-to-home communication ran on manually updated email groups, phone calls routed through the student information system (SIS), and paper flyers that families may never have seen. Money for field trips and prom moved the same way: cash, checks, and envelopes collected by hand. 

Two colleagues have guided the district’s shift to a single platform. Tara White, Director of Testing and Technology, led the move from manual email groups to districtwide adoption. Tara Poolson, Technology Integration Specialist and ParentSquare Ambassador for the district, has championed the newest chapter: taking school payments cashless with ParentSquare Pay. Together, they describe a district that solved one problem at a time until communication, everyday paperwork, and payments all lived in one place.

Outgrowing manual email groups and paper flyers

Prior to launching ParentSquare, the district relied on a system of parent email groups for school-to-home communications. Each grade level and school used a separate group, with all email address updates inputted manually into the district’s SIS.

Teachers and administrators ran their own email groups, so the manual changes weren’t always obvious to everyone in the district. A principal would get notified of a parent or guardian who wasn’t receiving the emails, for example, and then someone would go in and manually update the system. “Handling everything manually was taking a lot of time,” said the district’s Director of Testing and Technology, Tara White.

Phone calls were handled the same way, managed manually through the district’s SIS, alongside paper flyers “that parents probably weren’t even receiving,” White added.

Building districtwide buy-in with early champions

Central Access Corporation, the district’s SIS, introduced Pearl River County School District to the ParentSquare platform for school-home communications. “We sat in on a ParentSquare session where they were asking schools across the state to pilot the program,” White said. “We all said, ‘we have to do this,’ and may have been the first district to sign up.”

The district started its ParentSquare pilot in January 2022 by asking for volunteers to test out the platform. Those early users soon became champions for the new platform as it was rolled out across the district. “We went into the 2022-23 school year saying that ParentSquare was going to be the only form of communication we’d be using, and that no one would be allowed to use the other apps they’d used for years,” White explained. “So, the fact that people had already fallen in love with using the platform was a big help in getting everyone else onboard.”

Seeing the difference as a parent

With three children of her own attending three different schools in the district, White saw the immediate benefits of consolidating all communications onto a single platform. Before, she was getting emails and reminders about band practice, class schedules, and parent participation.

“One day I was standing in the store, knowing I needed to bring something for the kindergarten classroom and not remembering what it was. The flyer was sitting on my counter at home. If only I’d had ParentSquare then, I would have had that information right on my cell phone,” said White. 

Reaching 100% contactability in the first full year

Switching to ParentSquare has also saved the district time and money. In the past, it was emailing registration codes to parents and guardians, a process that could easily take a full day to complete. To get families enrolled with ParentSquare, the district instead used Secure Document Delivery, letting families sign in, verify their information, and obtain a code on their own.

By midway through the 2022-23 school year, the district’s contactability rate, the ability to reach at least one verified contact per student, reached 100 percent. “In the past it was amazing how many students and parents said, ‘well, I didn’t get this’ or ‘my phone number and my email are wrong,’” White said. “Now we know that we’re reaching somebody for every single child.” 

The district also uses StudentSquare for all student communications, giving middle and high school students a simple, organized place to receive updates, communicate with teachers and coaches, and stay connected to school activities with administrative and parental overview.

Making attendance communication automatic

The district is also saving money once spent printing and mailing correspondence to families by using ParentSquare for attendance notices, which are now much easier for parents and guardians to view, track, and pay attention to. “This is a huge win because we really need to be able to reach families immediately to let them know that their children are missing school,” White added.

Those notices reach families automatically, and with two-way translation into 190+ languages, they arrive in each family’s home language. Next, the district plans to bring its attendance teams onto Attendance Plus, giving each school one place to track every attendance communication.

Managing everyday tasks and urgent moments on one platform

The district’s food services department uses ParentSquare to send out lunch money balance due alerts. Teachers use it to manage field trip permission slips and to send out information and reminders about those events. And school nurses built a customized form in the platform for incoming students, reminding parents and guardians to submit the required health and immunization data.

Those everyday routines paid off in a more urgent moment. When an unverified threat was called in to one of the district’s campuses, all schools immediately went into lockdown and the rumor mill began to churn. To keep everyone informed and calm, the superintendent used ParentSquare to send an alert, updating everyone as each school was checked and cleared.

“We were locked in our offices and didn’t know what was going on,” White said. “When the superintendent let us all know that the district had received a report and was checking every school, it helped put the teachers, students, and parents at ease.” 

Making school payments cashless with ParentSquare Pay

Communication was only the first fix. The district then turned its attention to another persistent operational headache: collecting money for school activities. Paper permission forms folded into backpacks, delayed checks, and chaotic payment tracking had long created friction for both families and school staff.

“What our district was most interested in was simplicity. How could we make the process of payments for school activities easier for our parents?” explained Tara Poolson, Technology Integration Specialist and ParentSquare Ambassador for the district. “ParentSquare Pay answered that question for us because payments are attached directly to the message.”

Parents no longer hunt down a separate website or a paper flyer to pay. They open the post about a field trip or activity and complete the payment without ever leaving the platform they already trust and use.

“When schools share information about a field trip, club activity, or event, the payment option can be included right there within the ParentSquare post. The information and the action are connected in one place. For families, that simplicity makes a big difference,” said Poolson. 

The district started small by testing ParentSquare Pay on payments for prom and cheer tryouts before expanding into field trips and other school events. 

“The change has also been helpful for teachers, sponsors, and school staff,” noted Poolson. “Previously, collecting payments often meant managing envelopes, updating spreadsheets, and sending reminders to families who had not yet paid. The morning of a field trip was a mess—with ParentSquare Pay, much of that chaos has disappeared.”

A blueprint other districts can follow

What started as a fix for unreliable email groups now covers nearly every touchpoint between school and home: posts and alerts, attendance notices, health forms, permission slips, and payments. Keeping communication and transactions under one roof has removed extra steps for everyone. Staff get time back, staying engaged with their child’s education is easier for parents, and students know what’s expected of them and when.

To other districts that want to consolidate all school-home communications on a single platform, White says getting champions onboard early can help quell any potential resistance to change. “We hit some opposition early on, particularly from coaches who had been using certain apps for years; they didn’t want to change,” White explained. “Fortunately, ParentSquare had a good answer to every one of their objections and changing to ParentSquare was simple and easy.”