SUCCESS STORY SUMMARY
Challenge:
Walton County School District needed a scalable way to manage communications, support rapid growth, and ensure timely, consistent responses to families and staff.
Solution:
The district implemented Let’s Talk to streamline communication, monitor response times, and improve collaboration across schools and departments.
Results:
With a 9.0 customer experience score, fast response times, and increased engagement through texting, WCSD has built trust and improved service for families and students.
Walton County School District (WCSD) (FL), is one of the fastest-growing districts in the country, serving over 10,000 students across four cities and 21 schools.
With rapid growth came increasing demands on administrators, a rise in stakeholder inquiries, and the need for a consistent, districtwide communication strategy aligned with WCSD’s core values: excellence, professionalism, innovation, and collaboration.
“Without Let’s Talk and K12 Insight, we would have information and inquiries coming in from 21 different pools and more than 10,000 students, their families, plus our thousands of constituents,” said Russell Hughes, superintendent of Walton County School District. “We had no data points, no easy way to look at all the information together and quickly make sense of it to determine community interests and how to support them.”
WCSD adopted K12 Insight’s Let’s Talk in October 2019 to unify service delivery, enhance accountability, and support a culture of collaboration and service. The platform allows families and staff to submit questions or feedback at any time, through web, mobile, or text, and routes inquiries to the appropriate team for resolution.
“When people call, email, or reach out to us on social media, it’s because they have something important they want to share with us,” Hughes said. “I wanted to make sure they had an easy way to contact us.”
With Let’s Talk, district leaders can track trends, monitor response times, and eliminate duplication of effort.
“Before Let’s Talk, we sometimes had multiple people working to resolve the same issue, not knowing it was already being handled,” said Dr. Jennifer Hawthorne, deputy superintendent, WCSD.
To increase accessibility, WCSD implemented Let’s Talk’s texting feature in April 2020, giving families without consistent internet access a way to connect with the district.
“We talk a lot about innovation in education and being on the cutting edge,” Hughes said. “It’s important our community knows they can ask us anything and they have an easy way to reach out. Adding a texting option helps with that, especially for our population that doesn’t have reliable internet access.”
Stakeholders can send text messages that are automatically routed into Let’s Talk so staff members can collaborate to deliver timely responses. After launching text messaging within Let’s Talk in April 2020, WCSD saw a significant decrease in phone calls.
“Our dialogues have skyrocketed since we introduced text messaging,” Hawthorne said. “It’s an easy way for our community to engage with us, day or night. We’re even hearing from our students because of it, which was something I hadn’t anticipated.”
Since implementation, WCSD has received more than 3,000 inquiries through Let’s Talk, with an average response time of less than one day and an impressive customer experience score of 9.0 out of 10.
“Having this system in place ensures we’re all on the same page and, if we need to miss some school days, we no longer need to be in the office to collaborate or respond to parents,” Hawthorne said. “Everything just keeps going.”
Let’s Talk has helped WCSD build stronger relationships with families, empower student voice, and maintain a transparent, responsive communication strategy as the district continues to grow.
“Parents really value Let’s Talk,” Hawthorne said. “They know they will get a timely response when they reach out using Let’s Talk, and we’re seeing return customers. They’re trusting the system and trusting us to get back to them.”
Using Let’s Talk, customers including families, students and community members submit inquiries to departments, such as safety, transportation, technology, and curriculum and instruction, or to specific schools.
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