SchoolCEO Conference

District communication is under more pressure than at any point in recent history. School choice has made enrollment competitive. Social media has made misinformation fast. Chronic absenteeism has revealed that disconnected families are a measurable academic risk. And staff capacity is stretched thin.

Yet most districts still operate with communication systems that were built for a different era: one-way broadcasts, siloed channels, inconsistent branding, and reactive crisis management. The result is a community that does not feel informed, staff who are overwhelmed, and leadership that has no clear picture of what is working.

This session gives districts a shared language and a structured path forward.

This is your chance to learn from our finalists for this year's SchoolCEO Excellence in School Marketing Award:

• Jacque Ballent, MBA (Frisco ISD, TX)

• Cristina Capretta, APR (Berea City School District, OH)

• Brittany Cowan (Denver Public Schools, CO)

• Skyler Hefley (Longview ISD, TX)

Each finalist will walk through a project that delivered measurable results in their district — the strategy behind it, what it took to execute, and the lesson you can take back to your own team on. Expect specific tactics, honest talk about what worked, and real numbers.

Most districts think they need an intranet. What they actually need is something the intranet was never designed to be.

For two decades, the word "intranet" has meant a staff-only website — a place to store policies, handbooks, and HR forms behind a login. That definition is dated. And it isn't what's actually broken inside most districts today. What's broken is the communication gap with staff. Information lives in fifteen different places. Critical updates get lost in inbox sprawl. Staff disengage because nothing ever invites them to engage. And leaders have no visibility into what's landing.

This session redefines what a staff intranet should be in 2026 — not a static page set, but a true staff communication hub where every internal update lives in one place, where staff actually engage, and where leaders can finally see what's working.

There's a difference between good customer service and genuine hospitality — and families can feel it. Customer service resolves the problem. Hospitality makes people feel like they belong. For years, SchoolCEO has championed building a culture of hospitality in schools: the front office experience, the bus driver who knows a student's name, the email that actually sounds like it came from a human. Now, AI is changing what's possible — and what's expected. This session explores how districts can use AI-powered tools like Community Experience to handle routine inbound inquiries at scale, while freeing up staff to deliver the kind of personal, responsive engagement that no algorithm can replicate. You'll leave with a real world examples of community touchpoints — digital and human — around the experience families deserve.

Your district has a brand whether you've defined it or not — it lives in how families feel when they walk through the front door, what they say about your schools at the soccer field, and whether they choose to stay. The question isn't whether to have a brand; it's whether you're shaping it intentionally. This workshop, walks through the architecture of a strong school district brand: how to identify your district's core identity, align your visual and messaging systems, and build consistency across every touchpoint — from your website to your newsletter to your staff's social posts. You'll do real work during the session and leave with a clear starting point for making your district's brand as strong as your schools actually are.

This breakout builds directly on this morning's keynote, where we unveiled new research on how families make decisions at each K–12 transition. Now it's time to put those findings to work. Attendees will split into small groups, and each group will work through all three transition stages: entering elementary school, elementary to middle school, and middle to high school. Using the keynote data, groups will brainstorm practical ways to re-engineer their enrollment and continuity marketing at every stage, from messaging and timing to the channels and moments that matter most to families.

Each group will report out to the full room, so every attendee leaves having heard fresh ideas and tactics from across the board. It's a chance to turn research into a real action plan, and to walk away ahead of the curve.

When a crisis hits a school district, communication usually breaks down in three places first: delay, inaccuracy, and misalignment. This presentation gives K-12 communications leaders a practical framework for preventing all three by building a system around one voice, one message, and one approval chain.

Attendees will learn how to classify incidents within minutes, activate the right crisis team, clarify decision rights, and communicate with speed, empathy, and discipline from the first alert through recovery. The session covers the official statement process, audience-specific message mapping, call center operations, staff and family communication, media response, misinformation and deepfakes, reunification messaging, and the training and drills that make a plan usable in real life.

This is not a theory session. It is a field-ready playbook for helping districts communicate clearly, protect trust, and make sure their community hears from them first when it matters most.

Participants will leave with a clear model for how to communicate early, accurately, consistently, and with empathy, while protecting trust and supporting operational safety during the most difficult moments a district can face.

Chronic absenteeism doesn't start the day a student hits 10% missed days — it starts with a pattern no one caught early enough. The research is clear: districts that communicate proactively with families at the first sign of a problem see measurably better outcomes. Studies from the Institute of Education Sciences show that two-way, text-based attendance outreach can reduce chronic absenteeism by 3–7 percentage points for at-risk students. This session shows how Apptegy's Attendance Pro puts that research into practice — automating AI-powered two-way SMS conversations from the moment a student is marked absent, capturing absence reasons, surfacing early warning signals, and giving staff the capacity to focus on the students who need them most.

Federal accessibility requirements for public school websites just got real deadlines. Under the DOJ's updated ADA Title II rule, districts serving populations of 50,000 or more must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards by April 2027, with smaller districts following in 2028. That means captions on videos, alt text on images, screen-reader-friendly documents, and accessible navigation — across your website, mobile app, online forms, and digital content. This session breaks down exactly what's required, what's at stake if you fall short, and how Apptegy's platform is built to help you get there — including accessibility features already embedded in your website CMS, tools to audit your current content, and a practical roadmap your team can start on now.