PowerSchool to Acquire Kinvolved, Expanding K-12 Platform to Provide Critical Messaging and Communication Solution to Improve Engagement and Student Outcomes
January 25 2022 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
By adding Kinvolved’s industry-leading two-way
communication, attendance, and engagement technology to
PowerSchool, schools and districts will benefit from stronger
collaboration and enable more equitable partnerships between
educators, students, and families.
PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC), the leading provider of cloud-based
software for K-12 education, has signed a definitive agreement to
acquire Kinvolved, a leading provider of K-12 communications,
attendance, and engagement solutions supporting over 250,000
students and used within three of the top four school districts in
the U.S. Adding Kinvolved’s leading communication engine to
PowerSchool’s Unified Home solution will enable schools and
districts to strengthen and simplify overall communications and
notifications between school and home to increase engagement and
help reduce absenteeism.
“Collaboration between teachers, parents, and students is one of
the most important aspects of an effective education, and we know
it’s a top priority for our customers to have efficient,
centralized notifications and communications integrated with
PowerSchool,” said Hardeep Gulati, CEO of PowerSchool. “We look
forward to welcoming Kinvolved to our PowerSchool team, and
together making a bigger impact on improving student engagement and
outcomes.”
Recent research from the National Education Association shows
how crucial parents and families are to the education and growth of
students, as support from the home directly increases student
attendance and academic outcomes. Ongoing COVID-related disruptions
have also increased the importance of schools being able to
communicate time-sensitive updates to parents and families no
matter where they are or the language they speak. The return to
in-person and hybrid instruction saw a dramatic increase in chronic
absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of the time,
with some districts reaching rates as high as 40%. Student absences
also have a direct and negative impact on available budget for
schools and districts, and recently accounted for $10.7 billion in
lost annual funding.
The combination of PowerSchool and Kinvolved will allow schools
and districts to centralize communication tools and attendance data
with leading teaching and learning solutions to help address
chronic absenteeism and strengthen engagement between home and
school. Adding Kinvolved to existing PowerSchool solutions benefits
educators, students, and their families in multiple ways:
- Deliver targeted mass communications: Recent disruptions
to teaching and learning have made timely updates to families more
important than ever. Kinvolved helps expedite the delivery of
time-sensitive school, district, and class communications via text
message, email, and voice call.
- Personalize 2-way communications: Increasing
collaboration between schools and homes is a priority for most
schools and districts. With Kinvolved, educators can support equity
and increase accessibility for all parents with individualized
two-way communications that can instantly be translated into more
than 80 languages.
- Raise attendance: Studies show that increased family
engagement is directly correlated to improved attendance and
student outcomes. Kinvolved’s digital attendance/engagement
postcards provide administrators with a simplified approach to
improving attendance with built-in reporting for deliverability and
open rates that support a more efficient and data-driven approach
to managing attendance-based interventions.
- Further integration with PowerSchool: As a partner since
2019, Kinvolved already integrates with PowerSchool’s
industry-leading student information system (SIS). Our users can
also expect additional embedded and seamless integrations with
PowerSchool SIS, Schoology Learning, and other products.
“The issues Kinvolved has championed for a decade rapidly
accelerated to the top of districts’ priority lists as a result of
the pandemic — the importance of positive school-home
relationships, and their impacts on student attendance,” said
Miriam Altman, Kinvolved CEO and Co-founder. “This acquisition
provides the ideal and timely opportunity for PowerSchool and
Kinvolved to join forces in providing proven, equitable solutions
to these pressing challenges now and into the future.”
PowerSchool and Kinvolved will continue to operate separately
until an official close has been announced. The transaction is
expected to close in PowerSchool’s first fiscal quarter and will be
funded with cash on hand.
About PowerSchool
PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC) is the leading provider of cloud-based
software for K-12 education. Its mission is to power the education
ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students
realize their full potential, in their way. PowerSchool connects
students, teachers, administrators, and parents, with the shared
goal of improving student outcomes. From the office to the
classroom to the home, it helps schools and districts efficiently
manage state reporting and related compliance, special education,
finance, human resources, talent, registration, attendance,
funding, learning, instruction, grading, assessments and analytics
in one unified platform. PowerSchool supports over 45 million
students globally and more than 13,000 customers, including over 90
of the top 100 districts by student enrollment in the United
States, and sells solutions in over 90 countries. Visit
www.powerschool.com to learn more.
About Kinvolved
Kinvolved is the leader in solving the student disengagement
crisis, by building foundational relationships between school and
home that get students to show up to class. Through its KiNVO
software suite, Kinvolved helps school systems build positive,
two-way relationships between school and home via automated,
translated text-messaging-based nudges, and provides attendance and
engagement data to school and district administrators to inform
real-time interventions. Supporting nearly 700,000 stakeholders
from small rural to large, urban communities across 16 states,
KiNVO is an third-party, efficacy-tested solution, helping school
systems reduce absenteeism by an estimated eight percent across all
grade levels. To learn more, visit www.kinvolved.com.
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Jenna Mills public.relations@powerschool.com (916) 836-6378
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