“LivingTree allows us to take a leap forward in community building by providing us with our own private social network for collaboration and engagement across our district, school, and classroom communities.”– Adrian Garcia, PSJA ISD Chief Technology Officer

Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD, located in South Texas just north of Mexico, serves ~32,000 students. By the numbers, PSJA ISD is 89% economically disadvantaged, 98.9% Latino, 11% ESL, 35% Bilingual, and 6% migrant in population.

As a nationally recognized district, PSJA ISD has done incredible work in pushing the bar for high school graduation and college success rates. PSJA wanted to build on this success and develop broader community within their schools and district. PSJA faced language, technology, and cultural barriers when building community and partnership. They sought to reach as many parents as possible and to empower parents by giving them a voice into the education community. To do this, PSJA ISD implemented LivingTree’s school communication platform in an effort to include all families via mobile application and two-way translation. PSJA ISD has been using LivingTree since the spring semester of 2014. In the fall 2015 school semester alone (time period beginning August 1, 2015), PSJA opened a virtual window to their classrooms more than 20,000 times. Their community has engaged within the network by commenting 2500+ times and showing appreciation in 42,999 instances: