Frontline Education Releases Year-to-Date Administration Software Innovation Summary Supporting K-12 Market Dynamics

New and enhanced functionality across all solution sets helps school leaders address labor shortages, rebound from pandemic among other market conditions

Frontline Education, a leading provider of administration software purpose-built for educators in K-12, announced a host of new and enhanced product functionality across its broad portfolio of connected solutions for human capital management, student and special programs, business operations and analytics. Product advancements launched in First and Second Quarters 2022 were conceived and designed to support K-12 leaders as they navigate current market conditions such as recruiting and retaining teachers amid the labor shortage, maintaining the health and wellness of students and staff, and responding to the market’s need for comprehensive, integrated technology solutions that drive efficiency.

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“We have an unrelenting dedication to the scope and scale of opportunities school districts face in meeting the ever-expanding technology needs of K-12 education,” said Kevin Haugh, Chief Product Officer of Frontline. “Through technical innovation and with the know-how to tackle even the greatest administrative need, the product updates we’ve made during the first half of this year bring greater value to K-12 leaders by continuing to enhance efficiency, increase productivity and optimize performance so clients can focus on student outcomes. As school leaders prepare for the busy back-to-school season, our objective with these enhanced capabilities is to support districts in their desire to ensure operational excellence.”

First Half 2022 Product Highlights

Addressing the Labor Shortage with Best-in-Class Technology

Frontline’s Human Capital Management (HCM) solution helps school districts attract, engage, grow and retain great people while strengthening the employee journey — a critical, strategic need as K-12 education combats a labor shortage attributed to retirements, resignations and fewer candidates entering the field. The Frontline Absence Mobile App, which enables administrators and employees to manage absences and time at work quickly and easily while on-the-go, recently launched enhanced functionality and is now available to substitute teachers at no cost. Substitutes can now view, filter, and accept vacancies via their mobile device as soon as absences are entered, increasing the speed at which absences are filled and the overall fill rate in order to maintain instructional time. Districts that leverage the mobile app thoroughly see fill rates that are on average 13% higher than districts with lower mobile adoption. Incredibly popular within the App Store with a 4.5+ star rating, the Absence Mobile App was leveraged to fill nearly three million open jobs in the 2021-2022 school year.

“In today’s K-12 climate it almost seems as if no one is immune to the teacher shortage crisis, which makes filling absent teacher positions with qualified substitutes vitally important,” said Liza McGarity, Assistant Superintendent at Fort Mill School District in South Carolina. “We’ve been working with Frontline Education for nearly a decade and with substitutes now being able to access the Absence Mobile App, it has been a gamechanger for our district. The app has become the highest performing platform filling more than 7,000 jobs just this year, helping us to achieve an 85% fill rate.”

Selected as a finalist by the prestigious SIIA CODiE Awards Program, Frontline’s HCM suite also helps school leaders retain the quality staff they already have in place with the help of professional growth solutions which enable districts to track and manage the best practice professional learning programs. The recently launched and award-winning My Growth Journey Functionality provides a comprehensive view of teachers’ professional growth including professional development activities and evaluation insights to enable a holistic view of their personal journey. A new Learning Designer Capability enables organizations to create robust course content that supports proactive, ongoing professional learning and underscores the school’s commitment to providing learning opportunities and clear career pathways for employees. Also under Frontline Professional Growth, a new Evaluation Cycle Update Tool within the Employee Evaluation Management product will enable school leaders to upload evaluations in bulk, saving time and reducing human error.

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Maintaining Health and Wellness of Students and Staff

The mental and physical well-being of students and staff has become more important than ever, which necessitates a need for better technology and tracking. New features to Frontline School Health Management—which supports a district’s health office and offers access to the most robust Electronic Health Records solution on the market—now provide the ability to streamline scheduling for individual and group counseling sessions. There are also new Workflow and Data Validation Enhancements to School Health Management which make workflows faster and easier for school leaders and end users, saving administrative time and allowing them to get back to what they care about most: supporting students. Additionally, Frontline continues to expand pandemic-response and user-focused features related to COVID-19 health checks, test results, vaccine status and quarantine management, ensuring easy import and accuracy. All of these features place the students’ needs first and help school leaders to identify and respond to emerging trends and critical programs such as Handle with Care while keeping districts compliant and schools safe.

Increasing Adoption of Instructional Technology Devices

The pandemic brought attention to the need for technology that supports remote learning as evidenced by a sustained increase in the number of student-issued devices over the past 24 months. Frontline’s Inventory Management solutions empower administrators with knowledge of the assets a district has, where they are located and what funds were used to purchase each one.

New enhancements to Frontline’s Inventory and Help Desk Management will help school leaders manage the device distribution process with accuracy and effectiveness. New Integration with Google provides admins the ability to automatically enable or disable Chromebooks with ease and also includes the ability to disassociate an asset tag from an incorrect purchase order. Additionally, Frontline has made enhancements to the overall mobile experience. With Mobile Collection for Asset Management, users can now perform site-to-site transfers of assets and can add charges and payments during the collection process, all within the palm of their hand.

“Frontline’s Asset Management holds all of our inventory data and makes it easy to look up student, staff and device details,” said Nicholas DePauw, Director of Information Technology at Patterson Unified School District in California. “Within a minute, I can tell you exactly how many assets my district has and their total value.”

Planning Strategically to Better Serve the Next Generation of Learners

Frontline Analytics enables district leaders to harness the power of their data to make more informed decisions for the benefit of their students and communities. New Automated Features to Financial Analytics greatly reduce manual entry and increase the speed to update new financial models for the new fiscal year. Enhanced Functionality to Role Management within Student Analytics Lab, a tool that helps schools to close the digital divide and achieve equity, enables school leaders to manage user roles easily and efficiently in a scalable manner.

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