How Districts Can Protect Student Progress During Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges to American public education. When social distancing forced school districts to rapidly adapt to remote learning in the spring, the Brookings Institution predicted students who resumed online learning this fall would return with less than 50% of typical yearly learning gains in math. McKinsey estimates students receiving average remote instruction could lose the equivalent of four months of learning this year, and will “probably increase high school dropout rates.” Most unfairly of all, the pain of these setbacks will fall harder on students of color, who were already 70% more likely to experience a scheduling or transcript error.
As your district navigates the challenges of COVID-19, it’s essential to empower your counselors to keep students on track for graduation. This demands more than manual processes and countless spreadsheets of student information. You need a centralized student progress platform like Mesa Cloud to bring all transcript and scheduling data together in one place. This technology can give your counselors the edge they need to protect student progress in the midst of a global crisis.
3 ways Mesa Cloud fills academic gaps worsened by COVID-19
Mesa Cloud is designed to be an academic pacemaker for your scheduling data. By automatically eliminating scheduling errors and tracking student progress, Mesa Cloud frees your school counselors from squinting at spreadsheets so they can focus on students in need. During the additional challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic, it’s all the more important to empower counselors to better advise students. Here’s how Mesa Cloud addresses common graduation path hurdles:
- Changing graduation requirements
It’s not uncommon for school districts to adjust graduation requirements or reclassify courses from year to year. By integrating with your SIS, Mesa Cloud automatically keeps up with up-to-the-minute changes to your district’s graduation policies. Should a change impact any student’s graduation status, school counselors will receive an automated report so they know what action to take. - Academic inequity
Students of color with a 3.7 GPA are 25% less likely to be placed in advanced courses than white students. To prevent students of color from falling through academic cracks, Mesa Cloud gives students visibility into their own progress and automatically flags high performing students for counselors. This provides a digital safety net to ensure all students—regardless of race—are in classes that fit their potential. - High student:counselor ratios
In large school districts, it’s common for school counselors to advise hundreds of students each academic year. Manual tasks like managing shared spreadsheets and digitizing paper records can eat up time that counselors would rather spend helping students. By automating these routine tasks, Mesa Cloud helps free up counselor schedules so they can prioritize their work in encouraging and advising students.
During this unprecedented challenge to American public education, school districts need a centralized platform for student progress.
