“Happy Friday. Pardon my hair, I look like what I’m going through,” Durham Public Schools Chief Communications Officer Sheena Cooper laughs as she settles into our call. It’s only October and she’s reflecting on what has already been one of the busiest years in the communications department's history. “Not as much drama as previous years,” she says, “but the rate at which things are happening, just wow.”
In Durham, North Carolina where Research Triangle Park sits just five minutes from the district’s central office, innovation literally lives next door. But bringing innovation inside a large, complex school district requires both courage and patience. “We’re a district that is a bit resistant to change,” Cooper says, “and this year everything changed at once.”
Cooper has learned that leadership in a high-profile district means constant motion and constant scrutiny. “Durham is an extremely vocal, passionate community,” she says. “People are vocal about what they love and just as vocal about what they don’t. And that’s both the challenge and the beauty of working here.”
That candidness reflects Cooper’s own leadership style: transparent, strategic, and grounded in service. Her mission over the past two years: simplify how the district communicates and connect every family, staff member, and school through a single, cohesive system.
Many Platforms, Many Problems
When Cooper took the reins of the Office of Public Affairs, Durham’s communication systems were fragmented. Every school had chosen their own tools like Remind, TalkingPoints, ClassDojo, Seesaw, even private Facebook groups. “If you were a parent with kids in three schools,” she recalls, “you could be juggling three different apps just to talk to your teachers. It was confusing, inconsistent, and exhausting.”
Durham’s communications infrastructure mirrored a larger identity issue. “We often said we operated as a system of schools, not a school system,” Cooper explains. “Each school did what worked best for them, but we weren’t unified.”
Families noticed. Surveys showed parents wanted consistent, streamlined communication. Teachers were frustrated by a need for duplicated effort. And with 30,000+ students, 5,000 employees, and a politically active community, inconsistencies weren’t just inconvenient, they eroded trust.
One Place for Everything
Before she knew the solution, Cooper had already defined the goal. “I told our board and leadership team that we need one centralized hub for communication, one place for families to get information from their school, their teachers, and the district. I didn’t know yet what the product would be, but I knew what the outcome needed to look like.”
That vision began taking shape when DPS partnered with Apptegy to rebuild its digital ecosystem from the ground up. The rebuild started with new district and school websites, an upgraded alert system, a new newsletter tool called Engage, and finally a districtwide rollout of Rooms, Apptegy’s two-way communication platform. ALL of these tools are integrated within Apptegy’s unified communication platform.
Website First, Confidence Next
Cooper’s team started with what families see first: the website. Working with Apptegy’s design team, DPS launched a sleek, modern site with intuitive navigation, accessible design, and clear pathways for parents and staff. Finding answers got much easier. Calls and help-desk tickets dropped. Most important: trust ticked up.
“Getting that site live was a huge moment,” Cooper says. “It boosted our confidence in what we could deliver and our stakeholders’ confidence that we would deliver.”
The website success also opened a door to modernize other pieces of the communication system. The Apptegy alert system now allows targeted outreach system-wide, “If I want to send something to ninth graders only, I can do that” as it supports flexible grouping and segmentation. Cooper says. “It’s saved our team hours each week and drastically reduced help-desk calls.”
Engaging through Newsletters
From alerts, the upgrades turned to newsletters. Durham’s Weekly Spark newsletter was already very popular, it was just very time consuming to produce. Using Apptegy’s Engage newsletter tool, a new and improved Weekly Spark newsletter now lands weekly in parent and community member’s inboxes with far less effort. It has debuted with a 56% engagement rate. An employee newsletter just launched in August, and demand for department and school newsletters is growing by the week. “When people see how polished these Engage newsletters look, they want to replicate them,” Cooper says. “We’re building consistency not just in design, but in tone and timing. That’s how culture shifts.”
Launching Rooms
With the website, alerts and newsletter tools all in place, DPS turned to its most ambitious project yet: implementing Rooms, Apptegy’s two-way messaging platform.
Rooms gives DPS the ability to unify communication between teachers, students, and guardians in one place, inside the same app where families already accessed news, alerts, and updates. “For parents, it’s simple,” Cooper explains. “One app. One login. One place to find everything related to their child’s education.”
But as with any major system overhaul, timing mattered. “The state had just switched all districts to Infinite Campus,” Cooper says. “We went live with both systems this past summer, and that made it tough.”
Data mismatches between Infinite Campus and Rooms occasionally caused visibility issues. “Some parents couldn’t see all their kids,” Cooper says. “That has forced us to clean up our data and standardize how schools manage records. Painful at first, but necessary. It’s a work in progress”
Showcasing Early Success
Cooper’s favorite new superpower is answering anecdotes with evidence. “A teacher emails the board asking to go back to their old tool,” she says. “I sit down with our deputy superintendent and say: among active Rooms users, 99% of parents are coming back to use it again. That’s engagement.
Adoption rates for just the first 8 weeks of use tell a powerful story:
61% staff activation
55% guardian activation (up from 46%)
96% staff engagement among active users
99% parent engagement among active users
56% newsletter engagement rate
Over 18K Durham Public Schools app downloads.
“Those numbers are proof,” Cooper says. “Once people log in, they use it, and they keep coming back.”
Families who don’t download the app still receive texts. Multilingual communication doesn’t require extra steps. But most importantly, parents now know there’s one place to check for updates. “Once families are in, they are in for their entire DPS career. From pre-K through 12th grade, we’re not onboarding 30,000 people every year,” Cooper says. “Next year is about smoothing edges, not moving mountains.”
The Human Element: Support and Service
One big factor in Durham’s success has been the human touch behind the technology. “The Apptegy support team has been phenomenal,” Cooper says. “The live chat feature gives instant help and teachers love that they can get an answer within minutes.”
Even better, DPS’s dedicated local client success manager, Casey Wyatt, lives right in Durham. “Having someone local who can train staff, visit schools, and answer questions face-to-face has been a game changer,” Cooper explains. “We never feel alone in this process.”
This partnership-based approach is essential to Cooper’s philosophy. “Technology alone doesn’t fix communication,” she says. “People do. The product just makes it easier for them to connect.”
The Parent Connection: Simplifying School Life
Even with strong early adoption, the team continues proactive outreach and support. DPS hosted a series of live parent webinars on how to use Rooms. “We had two sessions last week and two more coming,” Cooper says. “Attendance wasn’t huge, but the impact was real. We provided an overview of our App and Rooms. Parents asked questions and we provided a form for them to submit requests for troubleshooting.”
Each webinar helps parents understand how to use the platform which strengthens trust in the communication with schools and the district. “Even when a parent can’t download the app, they still get our texts,” Cooper explains. “It’s inclusive by design.”
For parents balancing multiple jobs or caring for children across grade levels, that simplicity matters. “Our job is to make the school part of parenting easier,” Cooper says. “Rooms does that, it takes complexity off our families’ plates.”
Principal Buy-in
The ultimate test of a district platform is whether school leaders believe it serves their goals. At a recent principals’ meeting, one leader summed it up simply: “It just makes sense for all of us to be on the same platform.” Cooper hears that as validation that the work is about district operation, not just convenience. “We’re not trying to make anyone’s life harder,” she says. “We’re making it safer, simpler, and more consistent for families and staff.”
Lessons Learned
Sheena reflections for other district leaders are candid and practical:
Clean data is everything. Your student information system must be your single source of truth. Rooms depends on it.
Lead with wins. Launching the website first built confidence for the heavier lifts.
Empower principals. School-based leadership buy-in drives teacher adoption more than any training session.
Combine tech with touch. Support systems, webinars, and human connection turn adoption into loyalty.
Expect resistance. The vocal minority will always make noise—data helps you keep everyone focused on reality and provides your success.
The Team Behind the Work
Cooper is quick to share credit. “The team in the Office of Public Affairs is top-tier,” she says. “We understand the critical need to communicate effectively, and each person plays a crucial role. The consistency of our message across products and channels, that’s our team.”
That team has also modeled the tempo of change. They’ve shown—patiently and repeatedly—that the website, alerts, newsletters, and Rooms are part of a connected whole. They’ve responded in minutes when schools needed help, and they’ve shown up in person when that mattered more. They’ve held fast to a single idea: simplify, then empower.
Building a Culture of Communication
The new unified suite of tools may be the foundation, but DPS’s communication ecosystem extends much further. With a unified communication hub, Cooper’s team now manages district news, social media, alerts, and newsletters all from one platform. “Apptegy gives us the ability to tell our story consistently,” Cooper says. “It’s the backbone of how we communicate.”
Apptegy’s scheduling and analytics tools allow Cooper’s team to track what’s working and when. “We can see which posts drive engagement, which schools are the most active, and where we need to provide more support,” she says. “It’s data we didn’t have before.”
Why It Matters
A school system’s credibility lives in the thousands of tiny interactions between families and educators. Durham’s courage to simplify turns those interactions into a coherent whole. It allows a district famous for its voice to use that voice with focus and purpose. And it gives parents, no matter their background or barriers, a clear path to engage with their child’s learning.
Durham’s work is not software-first. It’s people-first. “At the end of the day, our parents deserve a consistent experience with every educator across the district,” Cooper says. “That’s how we help students succeed. Period.“