Project: Students Experiencing Homelessness and in Foster Care - Form and Workflow Improvement

The District is responsible for over 2,000 students that temporarily experience homelessness (referred to as Mckinney-Vento) or are put into Foster Care each year. A Student Support Staff of two manage the daily intake of students for our 54 schools. An outdated paper form, often faxed incomplete or incorrect, led to a delay of placing these students into the nearest school of their temporary locations. We worked to create an online form that eased the experience of completing the form, as well as created a custom workflow to send these receipts quickly to the proper recipients. We also addressed state compliance and executive-level reporting.

Platform/Application: Qualtrics
While many companies use Qualtrics to survey customers to gather CX data—as a school district, I often use the customization capabilities of Qualtrics to provide solutions that ease budget concerns.

Stakeholders: PPS Student Support Services, Social Workers/Counselors of our 54 schools, Public Education Agency of Allegheny County, Department of Health Services (DHS), Child, Youth and Family Office (CYF)

Project Role: Systems Administrator and Project Manager

Scope: Create an online form that is completed properly the first time and shortens deliver window from entree to Student Support Services. Every day that the process is delayed is a day the student misses school.

Other Project Goals:

• Use Qualtrics Data Reporting capabilities to create summary reports for executive leadership and for state reporting. At the end of the year, Student Support Services faces a rush of counting paper forms and the numbers might not always be accurate. Accuracy is imperative as the department needs these numbers for funding.

• Update the current form to new state requirements. This requires adding new fields that burdens that staff completing the forms and creates a longer process that will need to be addressed with additional training. Our goal is to find a balance that does not overwhelm the PPS employees filling out this form, but also ensure that the district stays in compliance with reporting.

Prior Process:

Paper form was completed at school-level and faxed or emailed to Student Support Services team. My initial notes show missing and incorrectly named fields as well as ways we easily insert the use drop-down and multiple choice options to save the user time when completing the online form version.

The third image notes the different verbiage and information from our Foster Care stakeholders, all which are not located on the current form. Initial meetings with these stakeholders led us to create a survey flow that branched off into two directions based on student experience.

Additional Functionality based on Project Goals:

I customized additional workflows within Qualtrics to shorten the timeframe to deliver the student information to those that need it. Based on logic, the form sends information to different users. This allows our Student Services team, our counselors, and our social workers to immediately be alerted to this information.

The shortened timeframe allows for transportation and enrollment to be coordinated in a fraction of the time and our students to spend less time out of school.

Additional Reporting Capabilities based on Project Goals:

Custom Report templates were created within Qualtrics in order for Student Support Services to pull executive level reports within moments.

The team was never before able to pull real-time reports of:

• YTD enrollment totals

• Grade-Level, School-Level enrollment totals

• Totals of Services Used (such as transportation, Special Education, After-School Programs) for budgeting