ASHLAND — Ashland City Schools announced a plan to change its communication system from Remind to Bloomz for the 2024-2025 school year at Monday night’s meeting.
Ben Spieldenner, the district’s chief innovation officer, gave a presentation about the change, explaining Bloomz.
Bloomz is an application, similar to Remind, that allows schools, coaches and teachers to communicate directly with parents and students about district activities.
According to its website, Bloomz started in 2013 and offers “a unified, easy-to-use, social media-inspired solution.”
Like the Remind app, which the district currently uses, Bloomz allows for two-way communication between parents or students and teachers.
Teachers also have the ability to import Google calendars to Bloomz or create calendars on the app, which can help with scheduling parent-teacher conferences.
Student and staff recognitions
Spieldenner also said the app provides a platform to track PBIS rewards. PBIS stands for Positive Behavior Intervention Systems, which the district uses to offer rewards for students behaving well at school.
Students can also submit assignments on Bloomz. Spieldenner said Bloomz will replace Canvas for kindergartners through fourth graders. The district won’t use Canvas at those grade levels anymore.
By making the transition to Bloomz, Spieldenner estimated the district would save around $20,000. It would replace several other applications the district currently uses, like PBIS Rewards, Remind and Canvas.
‘Tough but necessary’
Spieldenner said the transition to Bloomz was “tough but necessary.”
He told the board the transition has been a year-long process and teachers have already begun using the new technology.
“It’ll condense several resources that we have down to one,” Spieldenner said.
The district saw more new tech updates in August as it kicked off the school year.
It started using Go Guardian, which allows teachers to monitor and limit access to certain websites on students’ Chromebooks.
Ashland City Schools also implemented Final Forms this year. That technology made external forms for parents, like emergency medical forms, electronic.
Other business
Superintendent Steve Paramore said the district has entered a school resource officer agreement with the City of Ashland. The arrangement includes the city footing the bill for the SRO.
“Per… OSBA seminars that I’ve been to and that Kyle (Klingler) has been to, we needed to get an agreement in place even though we have no monetary involvement,” Paramore said.
The district is “blessed” by Officer Jeremy Jarvis as its school resource officer, the superintendent said.
The district also recognized students of the month and updated the student activities code of conduct.
The board went into executive session at 6:12 p.m. It will have a work session on May 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Ashland City Schools administrative building.