Few school districts face the same level of competition as Denver. The city is surrounded by 18 successful school districts which means that parents can quickly shift schools based on experience or perception. And perception, Good knows, is reality.

“If you’re not telling your story, someone else is going to tell it for you — and you probably won’t like their version.”

Before Denver began its communication transformation, each school was using its own mix of tools: emails through Google, newsletters in Canva, and classroom level communication through a dozen different apps.

“Everyone was just trying to make it work,” Good remembers. “It wasn’t that people didn’t care. It was that we had chaos. Too many tools, too many people trying to do the same thing in different ways.”

So Denver made a one-platform bet that would change how the district communicated, engaged, and competed.

“We wanted one tool for everything,” Good says. “One app, one login for families. Because if you make parents learn three different systems for three different kids, they just tune it out. We needed to make trust easy.”

Since 2023, DPS has utilized Apptegy’s website solution across all schools. The websites were clean, on-brand, and easy to maintain, which had already built a strong foundation. But Good saw the potential for something larger.

Over the next two years, DPS expanded to include Apptegy’s full suite of products adding Alerts, Engage, and Rooms, giving staff and families one unified system for emergency notifications, newsletters, and two-way teacher-parent communication.

Each addition was part of a clear strategy: simplify the experience for everyone.

“We’re not asking people to be PR pros. We’re just asking them to tell their story with the tools we’ve given them.”

Alerts became the go-to for time-sensitive messages, with DPS following best practices to keep messages short, relevant, and reserved for urgency. Engage, the district’s newsletter and storytelling tool, gave schools branded templates and shared editing capabilities so multiple contributors could publish without breaking style guidelines. And Rooms, rolled out just two months before the 2025–26 school year, became the centerpiece for family engagement. This now gave parents a single destination to find all communication: the Denver Public Schools mobile App .

Good and his team treated the internal rollout as a communication culture building campaign.

They offered training before summer break, ran refreshers during July Leadership Week for new hires, and backed everything with short video tutorials and on-demand support. But what made the rollout stick wasn’t the training, it was the story.

“We focused on the why,” Good explains. “We weren’t doing this to make teachers’ jobs harder. We were doing it to make it easier for families and staff. One place to get information, one system to learn. Once people understood that, they were on board.”

The why behind the work

Denver’s one-platform strategy wasn’t about technology; it was about trust.

By using a single, district-branded platform, DPS made its communications unmistakably theirs. Parents log in through the district’s website or App and see Denver’s name, colors, and imager, not a third-party vendor’s logo.

“Your community needs to see your name,” Good says. “When parents get a message from DPS, they should know it’s coming from us, not some random company name in the subject line. Every touchpoint is part of our reputation.”

Consistency and ease of use matters for teachers and staff. Rather than juggling half a dozen tools, they could now publish once and distribute everywhere. “Once people realized they weren’t learning ten systems, just one, you could feel the relief,” he says. “We’re not asking you to do more work, we’re asking you to do it once and do it better.”

In a 100 percent choice market, that ability to tell your story quickly, clearly, and authentically, can make or break a school’s enrollment.

“Every year you lose enrollment, you lose options. So we’re fighting for our future, not just our numbers.”

Rolling out Rooms: training, trust, and troubleshooting

When DPS launched Rooms, Apptegy’s teacher two-way communication tool, they did so with a blend of purpose and empathy.

The district offered multiple training touchpoints so staff could learn at their own pace. As with previous Apptegy rollouts, they followed their successful formula of providing ready-to-watch videos for anyone who missed a live training session. They didn’t just teach features, they again told the reason behind them.

“We wanted one common system that parents across the district would use. As a parent with kids in multiple schools, I knew how frustrating it was to have three different logins. You just tune stuff out.”

Still, the team expected implementation bumps. The biggest? Data accuracy.

Some parents couldn’t connect due to duplicate entries or missing contact info in the student information system. Others had both guardians listed under the same phone number, confusing automated syncs.

Instead of dismissing the frustration, Good’s team brought in a solution that blended technology and human touch: PTA roadshows. Communications staff members began attending parent meetings armed with troubleshooting guides, fixing accounts in real time.

“Parents just need a person they can talk to,” Good says. “If they can see someone fix the problem right in front of them, they walk away feeling confident. It’s not about the app. It's about the relationship.”

He smiles. “That’s the thing people forget. You can automate the message, but you can’t automate trust.”

Behind the scenes, Apptegy’s Identity Management tools helped the district detect and resolve these data issues even faster. The result? Adoption accelerated, and frustration turned into confidence.

“Once you walk a parent through the setup,” Good says, “they’re off to the races. They just need to see it work.”

DPS’s communications evolution has been hit this year with a sobering challenge: an enrollment decline. The district is down about 1,200 students compared to projections for the 2025-2026 school year. That’s roughly $18 million in lost funding.

Rather than cutting back, Superintendent Alex Marrero has doubled down. He approved a $250,000 advertising budget focused on student recruitment, an unprecedented investment for DPS.

“The superintendent told me, when you’re in a declining enrollment environment, the last place you cut is communications,” Good says. “That’s leadership.”

The goal: recover those 1,200 students.

The strategy: treat enrollment like a performance metric, not a mystery.

With the DPS per-pupil number at $12,000 per pupil for the school year 2025-26, if they can bring in 21 applicants, the campaign will already have paid for itself.

“We’re in a public system. Every dollar we spend on communications is a dollar not spent in the classroom, so we better make it count.”

DPS’s Director of Marketing Brittany Cowan is leading that charge. Using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, she is tracking every dollar spent and tying it to student acquisition.

Their model is built on past success: an early-childhood campaign that spent $70,000 and yielded 557 new family applications and landed 336 new students (at the time of this publication).

Now, they’re scaling that marketing success district-wide through a creative, bilingual brand campaign called “Denver P_____ Schools.”

The campaign features a tagline system where “Public” is replaced with five empowering "P" words: Passionate, Powerful, Proud, Prestigious, and Personalized to communicate different strengths across DPS.

Each ad tells the story of a student or staff member who embodies it. Spanish-language versions mirror the same phrasing for Denver’s majority-Latino community.

Geotargeted ads address hyper-local concerns, especially near district border schools where enrollment tends to leak to neighboring suburban districts.

“We’re not just trying to get people’s attention,” Good says. “We’re trying to change their perception.

“You’re not trying to win one battle,” Good says. “You’re trying to win 1,200 individual battles.”

The power of a green story

At the same time DPS ramped up its marketing efforts, it learned of 3 academic achievements truly worth shouting about.

1. The district earned a State of Colorado “green” rating, for only the second time in system history.

2. DPS celebrated a record-high graduation rate for the third straight year.

3. DPS students posted all-time highs in two of three state assessments.

Good’s team seized the opportunity to celebrate, and they were determined to make a big splash by being bold, joyful, and a little messy.

In just four days, they planned a literal record-breaking event where school staff physically broke old albums and Superintendent Marrero was doused in green slime, a nod to the district’s “green” achievement.

The photo landed on the front page of The Denver Post, and paired perfectly with a paid full-page DPS breaking records advertisement the same day. (see below)

“It was one of those moments that told our community, we’re winning,” Good recalls. “It built trust, morale, and pride.”

He pauses, then smiles. “We finally got to tell a story that wasn’t about a crisis. It was about significant academic achievements and that changes everything.”

Culture change from the top down

That mindset shift, viewing communications as central to district health, has rippled through the organization.

Denver’s principals now understand that communication isn’t optional; it’s a competitive advantage. The district even created a School Communications Specialist program, allowing principals to pay for on-site communications help one day a week. Those specialists manage websites, newsletters, and family engagement on behalf of their schools.

It’s a model of distributed storytelling that keeps the district’s message unified but personal. A delicate balance every large district struggles to achieve.

Still, Good admits adoption varies. “Some principals get it right away,” he says. “Others never will. But the results speak for themselves. You can see the enrollment difference between schools that tell their stories and schools that stay quiet.”

When asked what success will look like a year from now, Good doesn’t hesitate.

“If we hit our goal: 1,200 more students, that's an $18 million difference,”

“We don’t just do this for headlines. We do it because if we don’t hit our goals, people lose their jobs: teachers, bus drivers, secretaries. That’s what’s on the line.”

That human-centered return on investment is what drives him. Every message sent, every success story told, every ad buy, all of it connects back to people.

“At the end of the day,” Good says, “this isn’t about apps and ads. It’s about people showing up proud of where they work. We’re trying to make public education something people choose, not something they settle for.”

And that’s what makes Denver’s story so powerful.

In an era when districts are told to do more with less, DPS has chosen to do less with purpose: fewer tools, fewer logins, fewer barriers. More trust, more clarity, more connection.

“Anything we can do to lighten people’s cognitive load,” Good says, “is money well spent.”

Why it matters

The Denver story isn’t just about communication. It’s about leadership in the age of choice. It’s about how school systems can reclaim control of their narrative, elevate their brand, and prove that public education can be as innovative, data-driven, and customer-focused as any enterprise.

Or, as the Denver Post headline put it that day, below a photo of a smiling superintendent covered in green slime:

“DPS earns a ‘green’ rating for the first time since 2019.”

And in that moment, one color, one story, one community, Denver’s communication success story came vividly to life as front page news!

After years of trial, training, and trust-building, DPS’s one-platform strategy has become a playbook for other large districts navigating similar complexity. Its lessons are universal:

1. Start with one experience, not one tool. Parents don’t care what system you use—they care that the experience is simple, familiar, and bilingual when it needs to be.

2. Adoption is human. Offer multiple professional development pathways: live training, short videos, and one-on-one help. Frame every upgrade in terms of why it matters to families.

3. Reserve text messages for urgency. Families value texts when they’re rare and relevant.

4. Make data your permission structure. Tie every marketing dollar to measurable enrollment gains. Transparency builds credibility.

5. Communication is culture. From superintendent to secretary, every role contributes to the district’s story. The easier you make it to share that story, the stronger your culture becomes.