To help with Parent and Family Engagement requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and to meet the Civil Rights obligations of schools in working with Limited English Proficient (LEP) families and English Learner (EL) students across the state of Indiana, leaders in the Indiana Department of Education are partnering with TransACT^® Parent Notices. The new partnership, which started in June of 2018, provides all 467 local education agencies representing thousands of schools and teachers with unlimited access to expertly written parent notifications that meet legal requirements and guidance on required audiences, and recommended timelines.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has posted "A Parent Guide to State and Local Report Cards" on the U.S. Department of Education's (USED) website. 

The School Support and Improvement ESSA RoadMap is now available.

The U.S. Department of Education (USED) announced the release of the document, "Understanding the Every Student Succeeds: A Parent Guide to the Nation's Landmark Education Law" on October 4, 2018. The announcement describes this guide as "a parent and guardian-friendly guide to the important flexibilities in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)." When TransACT drafted its ESSA notices, they were written using the guidelines of the Plain Writing Act of 2010. According to the USED announcement, this parent guide was also written following those guidelines.

Proactive schools and school districts are finding and using all means available to communicate with parents, including English learner (EL) students and parents with limited English proficiency (LEP). In an article from District Administration titled “Tech: A language translator allows districts to reach out to ELLs”, a number of creative and innovative solutions are discussed. This includes the use of machine translation (computer-assisted translation) tools, such as Google Translate.

This blog has been modified from its original version, which appeared in the Ellevation blog. 

"Parent Notifications Summary, Checklist & Timelines" is a resource to help educators identify the important parent notification distribution, timelines, and responsibilities. This document is provided to TransACT ParentNotices customers with an active subscription to the ESEA (ESSA) ParentNotices Collection. In August of 2018, this resource was updated with a new title and guidance.

The South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) and TransACT Communications are announcing a partnership with South Carolina School Food Authorities (SFA’s) and ActPoint^®  KPI, a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) analytics system to help manage high quality food services programs.

As part of our commitment to provide school district administrators with resources and guidance on federal program compliance and administration, we regularly publish blogs featuring guest writers. We are honored to feature a co-written article between TransACT Executive Director of Federal Compliance and State Relationships, Dr. Holbrook, and his former colleague Keja Nokomis Whiteman, 

an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians discussing the importance of incorporating cultural history to support positive learning outcomes for Native Americans. 

I was motivated to initiate the writing of this blog when I saw a news story via Politico about the return of the remains of four Native American children from the graveyard associated with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the boarding schools that were part of past attempts to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into the dominant American culture. The mortality rate for Native American students at this school was approximately 2%. The school operated from 1879 through 1918 and over that time period housed about 10,000 students.

TransACT Communications, the leader in parent engagement compliance, is proud to announce that Executive Director for Federal Compliance and State Relationships, Dr. David Holbrook, will serve as a policy adviser for the Ellevation Advisory Board.  In this role, which is the first of its kind at Ellevation, Dr. Holbrook will help the Ellevation ELL community understand the impact of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 on the work of English Language Learner (ELL) educators and their students.