Written by Alanna Dushok
School-Based Technology Specialist at Fairfax County Public Schools
PART 1: Setting the Stage—Why Communication Matters at Westlawn
Westlawn Elementary School, a Title I school serving a dynamic community in Falls Church, Virginia, thrives on the belief that meaningful partnerships between the school and families are critical to student success. The school’s vision is centered on partnering with the community to provide every child the support necessary to achieve their highest potential. This commitment to collaboration is highlighted by Westlawn’s deep engagement with families and community, making “Communication with Families” the first of the school’s Ten Reasons to Love Westlawn. To uphold this pillar, Westlawn has embraced TalkingPoints, the leading universal family engagement platform, which has profoundly transformed the way staff interact with the diverse Westlawn community.
Westlawn’s community is enriched by a wide variety of socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds across its approximate 750-student population. Families at Westlawn speak 16 languages at home, with 64% speaking Spanish, 27% speaking English, and 5% speaking Vietnamese. In this context, effective communication is paramount, but historically challenging. TalkingPoints addresses these challenges head-on, providing a two-way text messaging service utilized by all staff members, from classroom teachers to administrators to coaches and specialists.
Westlawn’s commitment to leveraging this platform is evident in its usage metrics: the school was the 6th highest user of TalkingPoints across Fairfax County Public Schools in 2023–2024, and rose to 5th place in 2024–2025. To put these numbers in perspective, Fairfax County Public Schools is the 9th largest school district in the nation with over 223 schools, all of which use TalkingPoints as a communication tool.
See TalkingPoints in action—watch a 90-second explainer video.
PART 2: Meaningful Connections—How Staff Leverage TalkingPoints
The universal platform for connection
TalkingPoints is a research-based, unique solution combining three components of universal family engagement: embedded best practices, scaled family engagement, and data-informed guidance. The platform is universally designed, enabling relationship-building with all families. Crucially, TalkingPoints features industry-leading K-12 translation, removing the need for interpreters or parent liaisons in daily communication. A third-party validated quasi-experimental study found that the platform improved student academics and attendance overall, yielding “outsized results for underserved students”.
See TalkingPoints in action—watch a 90-second explainer video.
For teachers and administrators, the platform is simple, quick, and easy to use. Kindergarten teacher Lauren Gaither, who initially felt hesitant because Westlawn had never used a communication app, now states she “could never live without it.” Gaither previously relied on copying and pasting messages into Google Translate for non-English speaking families, or having the parent liaison make phone calls. Now, the automatic translation feature is her favorite, allowing her to build a stronger school-home partnership because communication is easier and doesn’t rely on email, which not everyone uses.
Kindergarten teacher Lauren Gaither, who initially felt hesitant because Westlawn had never used a communication app, now states she “could never live without it.”
School service providers, such as Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) Helen Larkin, have found TalkingPoints to be “remarkable” and essential for workflow. The SLP uses the tool to schedule IEP meetings and follow up after screening students for services. Before implementation, language barriers and time constraints prevented Larkin from proactively introducing herself to new families. Now, she uses the translation feature to communicate directly with families who do not speak English, reducing the time spent coordinating interpreters or phone calls, and allowing her to spend more time providing services to students. New families often express pleasure and curiosity, asking how they can help their child’s development at home, fostering a true partnership.
Even specialists at Westlawn have found TalkingPoints to be a game-changer in terms of the connections it allows them to make that were simply not an option previously. Librarian Trisha Heyer has completely transformed the notifications that she sends to students with overdue materials, moving from a printed sheet of paper sent home in the weekly news folder to a message sent via TalkingPoints. Heyer has noticed that families are very responsive to the notifications, and overdue materials are being returned at a higher rate than with paper notices. Her ability to quickly send a message on TalkingPoints is also less resource-heavy than creating, printing, and filing the paper reports in homeroom teachers’ mailboxes, and Heyer credits the speed and ease of sharing information on TalkingPoints with the increase in returned overdue items.
Let’s build something great together—start your journey with TalkingPoints.
PART 3: Building Bridges—The Parent Perspective
A window into the classroom: The parent perspective
The success of TalkingPoints is perhaps best demonstrated by the ease and effectiveness experienced by families. Parents at Westlawn consistently describe the platform as more convenient and less formal than email, akin to a text message, allowing them to quickly get in touch with teachers, specialists, or administrators.
See TalkingPoints in action—watch a 90-second explainer video.
Parent Ashley Coleman, mother of a third-grade student, noted that TalkingPoints provided “direct, immediate access” to her daughter’s teacher and was “so much more convenient than email.”
Coleman uses TalkingPoints for Families to share various updates directly with the teacher, such as information about late arrivals due to appointments, even while following the official absence procedures for the school. As an educator herself, Coleman understands the value of minutiae about student lives, and uses TalkingPoints to share details that help her daughter’s teacher get a broader understanding of her child’s life outside of school. Coleman also appreciates the photos sent by teachers, which offer a valuable window into her daughter’s daily school life, and provides a launchpad for a rich dialogue when her daughter arrives home from school.
For busy parents, the efficiency of the platform is a significant benefit. Parent Kathy Harrington appreciates sending messages “on the fly” about small but important updates (like a dentist appointment), ensuring the information reaches the teacher right away. She finds it easier than email because she does not need to remember the teacher’s first name, which is necessary for school email addresses.
Harrington’s favorite feature is the app notifications, which separate Westlawn messages from other communications and prioritize messages coming directly from the classroom teacher over general school announcements. This immediate, two-way communication builds bridges between school and home, ensuring each child is supported across both environments. For example, Harrington was able to quickly pull up messages with the strings teacher, Ms. Emery, regarding specific instrument accessories her daughter needed while shopping at the music store. This enhanced communication also allows teachers to share moments of celebration, such as quick updates on high reading assessment scores or positive state test results, ensuring the student’s success is celebrated across school and home.
Another parent, Amanda Mangum, who works in a hybrid office environment, finds the quick access invaluable, especially since she can only check personal email via her phone on in-office days, a cumbersome process avoided by the ease of using TalkingPoints. Mangum and her partner have also both enabled shared messaging through the TalkingPoints app, which allows them to be joined in a conversational group with the classroom teacher. This ensures that all three people see the messages that each other has sent, and ultimately makes it easier for her and her spouse to reference schedules, photos, or discussions quickly, which is crucial when balancing busy schedules.
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PART 4: Sustaining Success—Leadership, Strategy, and the Path Forward
Fostering timely support and intervention
Administrators at Westlawn utilize the platform to ensure timely and convenient communication. They value that the concise messages go directly to the guardian’s phone and allow preferred language translation. Administrator Stephanie Carpenter recalled an instance during an early release day where a student was terribly upset over losing part of a water bottle. Carpenter quickly messaged the mother, who responded immediately with reassuring words that could be shared with the child, allowing the student to quickly transition back to the group.
Another administrator, Erin Theiss, uses TalkingPoints to send positive messages and communicate regularly about students she supports, ensuring families are aware of minor interactions or attendance/incentive plan communication, helping her connect with families more often, regardless of language barriers.
See TalkingPoints in action—watch a 90-second explainer video.
By meeting families “where they are,” often preferring quick, tech-friendly, timely communication over phone calls, Westlawn is utilizing TalkingPoints to fully embody its mission to partner with families to create an extraordinary experience for every student.
Principal Christoph Hill echoes the sentiments of his fellow administrators and highlights TalkingPoints’ ability to “allow us to whisper into families’ ears” about school events and deadlines. Hill added, “TalkingPoints has revolutionized education in a way that few things do. It is a purpose-built program designed for this generation of parents. I love how it meets their needs instead of forcing them to fit into structures that we already had in place.”
Cultivating the conditions for success with TalkingPoints
Westlawn has been using TalkingPoints for five years, and originally adopted the program due to the school closures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the school originally adopted TalkingPoints, they asked teachers to sign up for the free product and manage their own accounts. After two years using the free product, Fairfax County Public Schools funded it for the entire school system and Westlawn transitioned to the full product, which allowed school administrators and school-based technology specialist Alanna Dushok to use newly available data to make decisions about communications schoolwide.
In the first year of having access to the data, Dushok focused on celebrating the successes of the staff members who were “power users” of TalkingPoints through monthly shoutouts in Westlawn’s weekly staff kudos slide deck. Although most staff were on board with using the tool by that time, the kudos raised awareness of the number of messages sent by the school’s top users and highlighted TalkingPoints’ ease of use. Throughout the course of the year, Dushok and Westlawn’s administrative team monitored the data and supported homeroom staff who were not yet using TalkingPoints to its full potential by offering workshops, setting up email alerts for messages, and modeling program use via sending schoolwide announcements.
In the second year of having data access, Dushok and the administrative team focused on using announcements and direct messages to ensure that families could receive “just in time” information about upcoming events and links to virtual evening events. They also used TalkingPoints as the primary vehicle to gain parent permission for students to access digital resources, a task that must be accomplished annually. Their efforts resulted in families relying on TalkingPoints as the primary source of school-related information.
Now, in their third year of having data access, the Westlawn team is focusing on non-homeroom staff and their use of TalkingPoints to continue to build community. During eight after-school sessions throughout the course of the year, all non-homeroom staff at Westlawn gather together and brainstorm different ways to use TalkingPoints to reach families in ways that complement homeroom teachers’ efforts. The goal is simple, yet effective: to help families directly connect with all the staff at Westlawn who support their child, from specialists to ESOL or special education teachers, to instructional coaches.
Dushok says, “At Westlawn, we embody the idea that ‘it takes a village.’ We want families to be as engaged as possible, and we work tirelessly to lower barriers to entry to ensure that everyone feels welcome. There is a concept from Brené Brown about a marble jar, where small acts of kindness add marbles to the jar and eventually build strong, trusting relationships. When our students leave us for middle school, we want all families to feel confident in their understanding of the American school system and comfortable advocating for their children throughout the rest of their experiences in K-12 education. TalkingPoints is the most significant way we can add marbles to the ‘marble jar’ we have for each family, which also makes it the most powerful lever we have to reach our goal for family engagement, not just with us at Westlawn, but also as our students advance into middle school and beyond.”
Let’s build something great together—start your journey with TalkingPoints.
