Longer form rant (sorry) for more context:

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I am glad the school year is almost over. While our kids have done well with remote learning, communicating with the two schools they attend has been nothing short of a nightmare. I don't know what the root cause might be. All I can assume is that their IT departments (two different school districts) are not as competent as one might like.

Quick context for non US readers: In the United States K-12 (kindergarten to high school/secondary) schools are not run centrally. Yes, some aspects are, yet, for the most part, they are run by local districts. There are over 13000 school districts in the US.

OK, with that context in place. Each of the two schools our kids attend belong to their respective school districts. They are only about a mile or two away from each other but, yup, somehow one the high school is in one district and the middle school in another.

Each of these schools has their own IT group. You can probably see this coming.

Each school decided to use a bunch of different methods to communicate with students and parents. These methods include phone calls, email directly from the school district, email directly from each school Principal, email from each school main email account, email from each teacher, email from the grading system/homework system, and, now, as of this week, they are adding ParentTrap, sorry, ParentSquare.

Oh, that's not it. They also use various services to send notices and calendar events. I can't list them, sorry.

Not done yet. Each teacher seems to have their own idea about how to manage communications as well. A range of things that include Dropbox to using Google Docs for a document everyone is supposed to check every day and, yes, SMS!

Before I forget, they also channel communications from the State...because that's different.

While the kids have done great in school (with lots of assistance) keeping track of all of this has been nothing less than a nightmare. If you could run a diff between all the messages and consolidate into a single page every day it would be great.

This is where the US system just drives me insane. Why is it that these schools, a mile away, need to be on separate districts? Why haven't they implemented a simplified and unified system for communications? Why is it that a single household has to receive a ridiculous number of messages every week from two different angles (example: One school wants to return to in-person and the other does not...one mile away).

Anyhow, before you say: Why didn't to engage with them to try to help them fix it?

I did. I met with them.

Well, these school districts, at the end of the day, are highly political. No, I am not talking about Democrat/Republican. Just the kinds of politics that burrow into these kinds of organizations. The IT guys --likely less-than competent, with an even less competent boss-- have no interest in hearing from an aerospace engineer with ideas on how to streamline and simplify things. If they improved the system they would lose their jobs...efficient systems and processes require less people. Principals in these systems don't have the power or interest to affect any of these things. They have budgets that depend on a number of things, including what they spend on IT-related matters.

And then there's the really nasty one: Teacher union pension salary after retirement is calculated as a multiple of what they earned in the last N years of employment (typically three years). During those three years it is common for teachers to pad their salaries as much as possible by getting paid to take coursework relevant to what they are doing. This is how they can end-up with pensions that would surprise lots of people. This, of course, is district dependent and might not be the rule in every district across the nation. In other words, if they have to take a bunch of classes to be able to communicate with students and parents using five different methods, bring it on.

I am glad the middle-schooler is done this year. At least they will both be in high school next school year and comms will be cut in half. Also, likely in person, which might cut it in half or more yet again.

Entrepreneurs: This is a hard problem to solve because of the aforementioned politics as well as the reality that sales cycles to school systems in the US can be incredibly long. I mean, you can invest years trying to get a district to adopt something and walk away with nothing. Yes, it is alluring to think of creating a system that can be adopted by the roughly 130K schools in the US. I don't know what the probability of grabbing serious market share might be. I do know that this requires VC funding with a long term (ten years?) vision, because nothing is likely to happen at scale much faster than that, particularly as we exit the pandemic and they go back to their old ways (and budgets likely shrink).

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