Ten years ago, TalkingPoints started with a simple but powerful belief: that every family — regardless of language, background, or circumstance — deserves a real seat at the table in their child’s education. As we close out the 2025-26 school year, that belief has never felt more validated, or more needed.
This year marked the end of our 10th school year. A decade in, we’ve powered 2 billion family-school conversations, reached more than 24 million educators, students, and families, and partnered with one in four U.S. school districts. But more than the numbers, what moves us is what those connections represent: a parent who finally understands why their child is struggling, a teacher who reached a family they never could before, a student who showed up because someone showed up for them.
As this school year draws to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve built together, celebrate some important milestones, and look ahead to what’s coming.
Expanding What’s Possible: New Solutions for Student Success
This has been one of our most expansive product years yet. Every new capability grew out of what our school and district partners told us they needed — and out of our mission to unlock the potential of families to fuel their children’s learning.
Launch of Academics at Home and our Academic Improvement Solution
One of the questions we hear often from educators is: How do we help families support learning at home? This year, we took a meaningful step toward answering it.
We introduced Academics at Home, a PreK-3 math and literacy solution that helps families support classroom learning at home. Each week, families receive curriculum-aligned activities that reinforce skills students are already learning in school and fit naturally into everyday routines.
This solution reflects a core belief at TalkingPoints: that families are essential partners in their children’s learning. When we give families the right tools and information, in a language they understand, they show up. And when they show up, students thrive.
Partnership with Illustrative Mathematics
Strengthening our Academic Improvement solution even further, we were thrilled to announce our new partnership with Illustrative Mathematics (IM) as an IM Certified™ partner. This partnership expands support for families of students learning with IM Math in K-12 classrooms, helping bridge classroom instruction and at-home learning by making key math concepts accessible and actionable for families.
Improving Attendance Through Stronger Family Partnerships
Chronic absenteeism continues to be one of the most persistent challenges facing schools across the country — and this year, TalkingPoints went deeper in its commitment to helping districts solve it.
Our Attendance Improvement solution, launched for the 2025-2026 school year, helps districts move beyond one-way notifications and data tracking. It enables real conversations with families to identify root causes using data to provide staff with actionable insights that improve attendance behaviors. Early results from partners have already shown improved family response rates, fewer unexcused absences, and lower rates of chronic absenteeism.
Expanding Our Trusted Communications Solution
We continue to build on our communication and engagement foundation to give school and district leaders one trusted solution for family, classroom, and districtwide communication. Together, this unified solution helps districts create stronger connections across the entire school community while ensuring every family can participate in the conversations.
Recognition & Partnership
We are grateful to have received meaningful recognition during this milestone year — recognition that belongs as much to our school and district partners as it does to our team.
We are honored to share that TalkingPoints received the ETIH Innovation Award as the Best AI-Powered EdTech Solution (USA & Canada), a recognition of our long-standing use of artificial intelligence. At TalkingPoints, we believe in using AI differently: purposefully, equitably, and in service of relationships rather than replacing them — always with a focus on improving outcomes. From our early adoption of machine learning for K-12 translation, to our AI-powered guidance features that help educators communicate more effectively with every family, we have always believed that technology should remove barriers — not create new ones.
We were also proud to be recognized as a Trusted Partner by the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, whose Family Friendly Schools framework has set the standard for meaningful family-school partnerships. This designation reflects our shared commitment to help schools strengthen, sustain, and celebrate meaningful family partnerships to improve student success and school culture.
And we were excited to be a sponsor of the Attendance Works Attendance Awareness Campaign — raising awareness about the importance of attendance and engaging students and families.
Partners Who Make It All Possible
None of this work happens without the educators and leaders who believe in our mission and the power of family-school partnership and who put that belief into practice every day.
During our 10th year, we were grateful to continue deepening relationships with long-standing district partners and to welcome many new districts into the TalkingPoints family.
We were honored to be on the road with our partners at national conferences and to bring their stories to light. A special thanks to the teams from Aurora Public Schools, Minneapolis Public Schools, Eden Prairie Schools, Tulsa Public Schools, Esperanza Cyber Charter School, Green Bay Area Public Schools, Baltimore County Public Schools, and Fairfax County Public Schools for what they do every day and for sharing their stories.
Closing Out Year 10 — and Looking Ahead
Ending our 10th anniversary school year feels significant. We have learned so much — from our research, from our partners, and from the families and educators who have trusted us with their most important conversations. We’ve also become more certain than ever that building strong, trust-based family-school partnerships based on the best practices of Universal Family Engagement is not a nice-to-have. It is a core strategy for improving student outcomes.
As we look toward the 2026-27 school year, we are energized by what’s ahead. We’ll continue expanding our Attendance and Academic Improvement solutions, deepening our partnerships, and building toward a platform that serves every role — classroom teachers, family members, school counselors, and district leaders — with the tools they need to make every family-school partnership stronger.
Thank You
To our district and school partners: thank you for trusting us with your families and your mission. To the educators who send messages every morning, follow up when a student is absent, and share a home learning activity with a family who has never quite felt included — you are the reason this works.
To our donors and philanthropic partners: thank you for believing in the power of family engagement and investing in a future where every child has the opportunity to thrive.
And to every family who responded, showed up, or simply read a message and knew their child’s school was thinking of them: you are why we do this.
Here’s to everything we’ve built — and everything still ahead.
Ready to make the 2026–27 school year your strongest yet? Request a TalkingPoints demo to see how better student outcomes start with stronger family partnerships.
