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Discover how Apptegy’s approach and platform is designed to help your schools reach all, all in your brand, and safely for all by reducing complexity and increasing engagement.
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At Apptegy, we’re fortunate to work with K-12 and civic leaders who care so deeply about their community. Here's what All In looks like to us.
SchoolCEO Interview with Jamie Vollmer
A former business leader and skeptic of public schools, Jamie Vollmer turned into an advocate for educators and schools. His presentations show the power of communities that value, support, and champion their local schools.
SchoolCEO Original Research
Transcript
Brittany Keil: All right, let's go ahead and get started. So before we get into what All In is all about, I wanted to introduce myself. And if you were on yesterday's webinar, you got to see me too. So two webinars in two days, exciting. My name is Brittany Keil, and I'm the research and external relations manager for SchoolCEO Magazine. I have worked with SchoolCEO for five years, five wonderful, beautiful years. I hope that you are familiar with our magazine.
And I have, in that time, headed up our research. We are about to unveil some new research plans that we've got, I'm very excited about.
Aside from my work at Apptegy, I was a special education teacher for eight years and taught in schools for ten, a career I actually began in Malaysia. So if you look on the bottom of this slide here, I am doing the Zappan dance in Malaysia. If you have a Malaysia connection, please reach out to me. I'm actually planning a trip to bring my girls to my village in Malaysia this summer.
I'm very excited about it, very nervous about it. I will have a one year old on a seventeen hour flight. So yeah, I don't know, send me good vibes there.
The stars of my slide are definitely my two daughters here. So the bigger girl's name is Rosemary. She is in first grade at our local public elementary school. We couldn't be bigger fans of the Edmonds School District.
We support everything they do. And then my younger daughter here in her Seahawks jersey, her name is Bea, and she is turning one next month. So lots of good, exciting things here. As far as a researcher, my interests really, really center around, you know, the relationship between families and schools and communities in schools.
I'm always trying to figure out how schools can better connect and communicate with their communities while also thinking about how internal communication can strengthen a district. So how do schools communicate with their teachers and staff?
So today we're going to go through four main sort of agenda items. First, I'm going give a couple of updates and announcements based on some exciting things we've got going on. I'm going to go through the Blueberry story, which you may have heard before, but I'm excited to share. We'll be talking about what all means all when we're talking about education and then how you can go all in on communications.
So first I wanted to show off our newest issue of SchoolCEO. This is the AI issue. And to be honest, this issue was a very long time coming. My team was most, was excited and wanted to explore like the capabilities of AI in school communication years ago, but we wanted to make sure we waited until the tools are right and the conversation is right.
So in this issue, we have new research signaling change, AI in the central office. In this research study, we focus on how AI is changing schools in the central office rather than in the classroom. So how are superintendents and communications directors using it? How is it impacting the work of communications and superintendents?
And then what do we need to move forward so that this becomes sustainable and exciting change that benefits the people who need it most? We have a Q& A with the author of The AI Driven Leader, Jeff Woods.
My boss was really excited because right after she got her copy of the magazine, she was on a plane and the man next to her was reading The AI Driven Leader, and she asked him how his book was going. And he said, it was really great, but he was in a rush to read it because he wanted to have some takeaways for his team. And she handed him our magazine and was like, well, my team actually interviewed this guy and we are ready to help you. So that was a fun little connection.
We have a mini prompt library that I encourage all of you to look at. It includes everything from how to build an AI powered communications assistant to how to generate FAQs from any article or a major document, and everything in between. We actually sourced these prompts from folks all across the country. So I encourage you to take a look.
And then I'll get Barrett to drop that in the chat. And then we have a profile of the incredible Denver Superintendent, Alex Marrero. That's just a little bit of what we've got going on in this issue. I encourage you to check it out. And if you don't have a physical copy, feel free to Slack, or sorry, feel free to email me or Barrett, brittney@schoolco.com, and I'll make sure that you get a physical copy sent to you.
Also, are excited to begin announcing some of the details for our newest SchoolCEO conference. The date is September twenty eighth through twenty ninth of this year, and for the first time, and I am so excited as a native Texan, we are hosting it in Dallas, Texas. In the next couple of weeks, stay tuned, we're gonna be announcing our incredible speakers. There's a lot to be excited about. We'll be talking about AI brand and communication. So please stay tuned and stay in the loop.
I believe our early bird pricing lasts until April thirtieth. So that's the cheapest rate that you can get into SchoolCEO Conference. I would definitely check it out, put it on your calendar, we'd love to see you there.
And then finally, Community Experience is one of Apptegy's newest products that we're announcing. So Community Experience is the industry's first AI powered community intelligence layer built inside a district's communication platform. So unlike standalone tools that require new logins and portals and all of that, community experience unifies AI search, chat, routing, analytics into one branded experience, giving families answers instantly while giving district leaders unprecedented insight into what their community needs and what they're looking for in their website.
So I encourage you to check it out. I think Barrett just posted a link.
All right, now let's go into part two, the blueberry story, which is one of my favorite interviews that I've had as a SchoolCEO researcher, and I'm excited to share with you.
So over the years, SchoolCEO has published nearly two hundred podcast episodes. And for the first three years of that, I was one of the hosts. So if you want to dig deep into the archives, you can hear it even more on my voice, although, you know, I don't know, wouldn't recommend it. And while we've spotlighted many illuminating perspectives, one of the most impactful to me was definitely Jamie Vollmer, and he tells this blueberry story. And we've often brought this up and we've brought this up along with best practices from the private sector about where K-twelve strategies need to go.
And I think what makes SchoolCEO special is that we're often trying to focus on that area between where the private sector is taking communication and where families are learning their expectations about communication. And then what also schools have capacity to do because schools have a very unique role in our society and they don't have all of the resources that the private sector has.
This pairing is what's made us special and what's made us a trusted voice for twenty five thousand readers. However, there's this one story I think that really captures where this strategy can fail.
So Jamie Vollmer is not an educator, he's a businessman, and he used to run the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company, which was once lauded by People Magazine as the best ice cream in America, so yum. I'm in Tillamook country, so those are kind of fighting words, but still, I was excited to talk to Jamie about this. So way back in nineteen eighty eight, Vollmer expected a, or sorry, accepted an invitation to talk to a local school about what was going wrong in schools.
So he came into this presentation, which was going to be to teachers with three major assumptions. First, that schools needed to change. Second, that the people inside the schools were the problem. And then third, that if schools would just run themselves like businesses, everything would be fine. It would be so much better. And these assumptions would not last long.
So fifteen minutes into Vollmer's presentation, the teacher stopped grading papers and ignoring him and started glaring at him. And when he opened for questions, a twenty seven year veteran teacher stood up and she asked about his ice cream. She's like, well, Mr. Vollmer, tell me about your ice cream.
He was like, well, it's the finest there is. And she's like, well, tell me about your ingredients. He's like, oh, well, we only use the finest ingredients. That's what makes the finest ice cream.
And so she asked what he would do with a shipment of blueberries for his famous blueberry ice cream that arrived and were below standards? And Vollmer's like, Well, there's only one answer, I'd send them back. And the teacher said, That's right, you can send them back, but we can never send back our blueberries. We take them all no matter who they are, curious, frightened, creative, privileged, not privileged, and we take them if they have English as their first language or their third, we take them all.
And that's why schools are not a business, Mr. Vollmer, it's their schools.
And so this of course was a very humbling moment for this businessman. And ever since he has brought it into how he works with schools. It changed the way that he talked to school districts and it changed the way he understood the importance of what schools do.
So ever since then, Vollmer has been a huge advocate for public schools. And when he says all means all, he thinks about this blueberry story because he knows that schools are not in control of who walks in the door, but they are in control are responsible for what walks out.
So Vollmer has this all means all mission, and he shares this Blueberry story in speeches and workshops all across the country, helping people understand why public schools have a special and unique challenge ahead of them. And of course, all means all plays more than to just students. When you promise to serve your community and all of your students, that means that your communication systems also need to reach all of your families, all of your stakeholders and your broader school community, all of those difficult stakeholders that you listed in the chat just a few minutes ago. And of course, these stakeholders aren't just the ones who are looking for engagement. They are the ones that we need to reach who aren't engaged at all, and sometimes who are actively ignoring or walking away from communication from the district. But the school district has to engage with them, has to bring them into the fold, and delivering on this promise takes commitment and tools.
Oh, here's a QR code if you would like to listen to Jamie Vollmer tell this story himself.
So all means all. So within public education, there's always been a focus on the importance of serving all students and all the community. I will say as a former teacher, this concept of all means all is very important to me.
When I started teaching, first summer, I taught at a charter school in Philadelphia. And the reason I taught at a charter school in Philadelphia is because they were looking for summer school teachers, and I needed a program that I could make a little bit of money while also gaining my teaching certification. And what I quickly realized is that kids who were being, you know, shuttled into summer school when they didn't wanna be there were not the easiest students to have.
Yet it was my job to make sure that they made gains in their reading, I'm a reading specialist, that they became at least somewhat active in the classroom and became engaged, and that that was my charge. It didn't matter, you know, like I didn't get to choose my students and neither do you.
So now on to part three, education for all.
So long before smartphones or shopping centers or civil buildings, schoolhouses were the absolute center of the community, drawing families together around a shared purpose. And this isn't coincidental. There's, you know, an often joke, often a joke that the first thing a community builds is a school and a prison. And, you know, we like to lean into the school side because that's just where communities find their biggest shared purpose. So districts don't just connect with their communities, they are the connectors, the vital hub where relationships can form and build trust.
We see this a lot in Arkansas, where Barrett and I were originally based.
A lot of school districts have been consolidated over the years, and when communities lose their schools, they often feel they lose the center of their connection. That's just how important the schools are.
But today, the reality is much more complex. Districts are competing for attention in an increasingly crowded landscape, vying for students through open enrollment, recruiting talented teachers and staff, and earning community trust amidst a lot of distraction. So the still holds, but it requires a lot more intentional effort to grow and to defend on the school's part, which always doesn't seem fair. At Apptegy, we've always understood that our district brand belongs at the center.
Our tools help everybody in your community be a better communicator.
And we want to understand what in your districts, sorry, we want your stakeholders to understand what your district stands for and how to support it. So we pride ourselves on having the best in class security and the most robust moderation features, but the goal of all of this is of course to help your community build trust with your district.
Schools actually a part of a, you know, actually have part of a very like special and historical goal to educate all children. The right to education of all isn't something that's promised in the declaration of independence, but it is a constitutional right.
Dr. Derek Black, who was a speaker at our last year's SchoolCEO conference, covers this pretty well. He says that education is a paramount duty of the state, and the state meaning the entire country, the government, for all children, and it's a fundamental value of the people.
But this becomes that much more difficult when schools are in an environment of competition. So schools are competing, as I said earlier, for students, parents, and guardians.
Charter school and private schools are actively recruiting as well. This is something that's only become more heated and probably will continue to increase. There is now school choice between districts. A number of states have opened open enrollment policies that mean that families can choose, you know, a district that is nowhere near their house.
And yet often the schools bear the brunt of navigating that transition. And then homeschool and virtual schooling are growing at a completely unprecedented rate. Some of this is coming out of the pandemic, and we do expect to see some correction, and yet school choice itself is not something that's slowing down. Voucher programs are quickly being implemented like wildfire across states where they were once a rarity in states like Florida and Arizona, they're now something that even states like Washington where I live are considering as probably a good possibility in the next few years. On top of this, schools are also competing for teachers, admin, and staff.
So districts are competing against the private sector and they often aren't able to pay at the same levels that the private sector is.
There are recruiting wars, and I've heard this especially in suburban school districts for the best teachers and specialized staff. I was a witness to this myself as a special education teacher. It's difficult when you have a difficult to place, teacher placement, and yet there are very few options that you can recruit for. And then culture and leadership matter more significant than pay and benefits.
When you are competing for teachers, they're not just looking at which contract is able to pay them the biggest amount. They also want to know which school district has the most likely success and is going in the right direction. That thankfully is something that you have a lot of control over with how you communicate, but it's still a challenge for school districts. And then finally, school districts are competing for the community's attention and support.
Everybody, you know, is a part of the attention economy these days, families are more distracted than ever. You're not just competing for, you know, the newspaper like you were maybe forty years ago, but you're competing against TikTok, text, news, busyness, etcetera, in the goal to reach your families. And parents are absolutely drowning in content from every direction. The community is disengaged. I was thinking about this yesterday. So my daughter's school district uses text messages to communicate pretty much everything from bus schedule changes to buses that my kid doesn't even ride, or the fact that my daughter forgot her lunch yesterday, which she did. And it can be really hard to sort of separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to that, especially when unfortunately my text messages look more like my inbox than they did five years ago.
Five years ago, most of my texts were from friends and family, maybe there were a couple of group texts. Now every business I've ever bought from is texting me about specialized drops, discounts, shipping notifications, it becomes so overwhelming so fast. And then through all of this, it is the goal of your team to build consistency, trust, and clarity through this communication.
When we think about how overwhelming all of this is, when we think about how much noise families are facing, how busy families are, and how many apps and channels and devices and fragmentation that they're encountered with, we have to realize that this is also multiplied on the teacher side and then multiplied by how many students a family actually has in the district. I feel lucky at this point that I only have one child in my kid's school district, because if I had more than one, and she's in first grade, so she only has one teacher, I feel like I would be only struggling that much more to stay connected.
So it can be really overwhelming for staff to have six to ten disconnected communication tools, vendor relationships are challenging, multiple logins that you can lose the password from, and then teachers end up spending more time managing systems and communication than actually doing the incredible work of teaching.
We call this the complexity attacks, that more programs, the more layers of your communication, the more difficult it is to access. And if you're somebody who is privileged or has the time to wade through everything, that is good, but not everybody has that ability. And those are the people who can't play the complexity attacks.
So now how do we go with all of these challenges all in calm communication? When we think about the complexity attacks, when we think about the challenges that we're facing around competition, how do we set our families and teachers and staff up for success when it comes to communication?
So first, we have to acknowledge the fact that we are all communicators now. This is something that's, you know, hard to accept at first, because especially if you're a school communicator, it can be natural to want to lock that down, but teachers, staffs, and principals are communicators. And we have good research about this in these issues.
Teachers, communications, and even tech directors are communicators in ways that they've never been before. And then families and community are still communicators as well on the fact that they're not just receiving communication, but they are also often some of your best advocates.
We take them all goes beyond your students. Today's school communication requires communicating to all, with all, and listening to all. And is this overwhelming? Absolutely.
Okay, can I grab a little drink of water?
So when we think about the fact that we're all communicators, something that I hear often is that school districts are reluctant to engage teachers as communicators because they don't want to add something else to their plate. And when it comes to this, I've got some good news.
Teachers, seventy five point two percent of teachers already view themselves as your communicators. They already see this as a part of their jobs. So we had a survey in Who Speaks For Your Brand, we asked teachers to agree or disagree with the following statement. It's important for me to be familiar with my district's brand and messaging priorities. By and large, teachers felt that this was already something that they needed to do. They strongly and somewhat agreed. When we looked at the results for classified staff, it was similar.
Principals are also some of your strongest communicators. I know that there's a lot of traditional research that the principal is one of the most trusted individuals in the entire community, not just in your school. And principals have a very unique advantage. They are connected to both the executive leadership and the classroom reality.
They understand what's happening kind of going on at the weeds, but also have the broader understanding of what's going on strategically. They have daily access to families. They get to witness these authentic learning moments and have touch points with families. I know my daughter's principal participates in school pickup every day.
She has a little bit of knowledge about everything that goes in the school and she is, you know, for that reason, somebody I trust deeply. And because of that, she's somebody who has relationships with students, staffs, and families, and also the executive level, the higher ups in the central office.
Communications directors, of course, are also communicators. School communicators, however, need access, connection, and understanding, and able to do the work most effectively. And something that I'm very cognizant as I say this is that school communicators are often overburdened and at the risk of burnout. This is a quote from one of my favorite studies we've done, A Seat at the Table, which we did in conjunction with a couple of years ago, but this is a wonderful quote from a communications director. It's very hard to tell the positive stories of our schools, our teachers, and our students when I am distanced from all of that in my district office.
And because of this gap, there's this idea of the understanding gap. So recognition drops from the central office to the classroom. So when we asked our respondents on a scale of one to five, how does each role understand the work you do? And to be clear, we're talking about the work of the communications director.
Communications directors reported that superintendents by and large understood their work. Principals and other leaders, it was mixed. So thirteen percent understood it very well, thirty seven percent only understood their work somewhat. And then, and this is most concerning to me, only three percent of communications directors said that teachers and staff understood their role at all.
And thirty six percent said not at all or slightly.
And then we have to think about how all of these different roles work together. So when we look at the executive level, we have the superintendents, the communications, and the tech directors. Where do you find the common ground, which is of course what this study is about, in building trust. So you can see this wonderful Venn diagram here. So despite their different roles, like every one of these professionals has a role in building institutional trust. So superintendents own the narrative building and the systems and security along with tech who work with comms for the tool selection and maintenance. All of this goes together to build community trust.
So what is the goal in building all of this? You want your communication to be clear, visible, and relevant. The most trusted communicators are those who by and large by anybody are those who are like you and don't appear incentivized to spin a message. What does this mean? This means that teachers are very reliable. That teachers are somebody that families look to for communication.
We found in our most recent study, What Parents Won, I love this cover, I love this cute kid, that positive, relevant, and frequent school communication build parents satisfaction more than anything else. A lot of times when I talk to communications directors or superintendents, they tell me that families tell them that they hear too much communication. But what we actually found was that when communication is structured well, so that it cascades rather than overwhelms, families don't actually mind if there is too much communication, the volume actually doesn't end up being that impactful. For families, teachers and principals play a vital role in communicating important information. Teachers are some of the most trusted individuals when it comes to school communication. What does this mean? This means, of course, that you have to align with teachers so that your brand of communications at all levels are on point and matched.
And this also requires school districts to shift from information sharing to translating value in storytelling. We have some really good examples in our resources, I'm happy to share about school districts who are able to take the viewpoint of all of these different communicators from teachers to superintendents, to tech directors, to the communications directors and everybody in between, and build cohesive storytelling models where truly all means all.
And finally, your communication is also challenging in that you have to communicate to five different generations. And communicating to different audiences and generations requires intentional work to capture attention and communicate value.
Earlier this morning, I was on a call with some communications directors out of Virginia, and one challenge that they were expressing was that a lot of school registration is online, and yet more grandparents are enrolling children than ever before. And that this is a barrier that's increasingly difficult for people to get across if they are a grandparent, if they speak English as a second language, and thinking about how they can strategically work to make sure that enrollment is not a barrier, because of course, we want students to get enrolled.
So with all of this information and all of these challenges, Apptegy has some commitments. First of all, we are all in on reach.
Our products allow multichannel delivery, role based messaging, and accessibility features that work for all. If you were on my ADA accessibility webinar yesterday, you got to hear in-depth about how we build our philosophy around this. As I mentioned, I'm also a special education teacher, or was for ten years, and so this is especially something that's close to my heart. We are all in on your brand.
So your district's identity is at the center of the work that we do. We want families to recognize you and not us. Why would they need to recognize us? They need to build trust with you.
We like to build consistent visual and messaging experience across all channels. And then we want to, you know, build the idea of one trusted source, which is you, and not a fragmented experience across a lot of different vendors. And then finally, we are all in on safety. So we pride ourselves on being the best in class security for websites and data.
I work very closely with our safety and security team. You couldn't ask for more dedicated individuals, they're incredible.
We have AI powered moderation to prevent unsafe communication. This is a newer aspect of our products that I think is really going to change the game. So when the AI is able to detect something that might be unsafe, it brings it to your attention immediately so that you can take action. And then finally, secure identity management and compliance controls.
So schools must be all in on communication. They must be all in for their communities because this is the way that you must function going forward.
And we are here to help at every step of the way. And that is the goal of this webinar, to help you understand where your challenges lie and also how our tools are able to help meet you there.
As my call to action, I'm kind of have a choose your own adventure here. So first, if you are doing something that you think illustrates the reality of what all means all can look like, and there's a story that you think should be shared across the country, I have a QR code right here that you could talk to one of my team members.
And then finally, if you'd like to talk to an Apptegy expert about how our tools can help you reach all means all, I have a QR code here too, so that you can set up a call for that.
Thank you, I'm gonna leave it on this slide, just in case you need to take note of those QR codes. Thank you for joining us today, and I hope you stay tuned about other events and webinars we have in the future.
I appreciate the time that you gave us, and I am excited to continue this conversation forever.