EduLink
Organizing, Departmentalizing, and Automating the Compliance Elements

Technology leaders in the education sector are searching for solutions that can ease the burden of each department across the district/ organization in accurately tracking and managing the ever-growing number of compliance items for which they are responsible. A typical district that doesn't use a quality software solution has a very disconnected and pedestrian way of tracking and managing compliance items such as teacher evaluations, clearances, mandated trainings, continuing education hours, emergency drills, and safety surveys. "EduLink's compliance tools organize, departmentalize and automate the management of these items," says Dr. Reed Hankinson, the director of EduLink. With its compliance based software tools, the company has an unprecedented market share in Pennsylvania, where nearly 85 percent of the school districts in the state have implemented at least one of EduLink's software solutions.

EduLink primarily delivers two solutions. The first one is PA-ETEP, a comprehensive suite of teacher evaluation tools fully aligned with the Pennsylvania Department of Education. The solution has multiple modules that facilitate all aspects of the teacher evaluation process. The software is 100 percent aligned with the educator effectiveness framework in PA and is used by over 80 percent of school districts across the state. Next in the company's arsenal is COMPLY. An online software application, COMPLY tracks and manages compliance items in one place with an easy to use interface that keeps school district employees and districts/organizations on track and in compliance. "With COMPLY, you can easily track clearances, mandated trainings, acknowledgements/sign-offs, maintenance inspections, school safety and security requirements, form requests, professional development, para-educator hours and much more!" says Dr. Hankinson.

EduLink has helped many school districts with COMPLY, including Apollo Ridge School District that needed a better way to track Act 48 continuing education hours along with the ability to include feedback forms for the event as well as publish an event with a future date. The client also wanted to track their clearances and mandated trainings. The COMPLY software allowed them to operationalize this efficiently and saved them a considerable amount of time.

We know exactly what it is like to be in a school system, and we understand the hurdles that are involved in creating an exceptional educational environment

"The ability to look at any activity/roster with just a click has been a tremendous help to the district," says Dr. Hankinson. With success stories like this, it is a no brainer that EduLink has 97 percent of client retention rate over its 21 years of providing solutions. "When administrators move from one district to another district that may not use our tools, we are one of the first phone calls that they make," adds Dr. Hankinson.

What really fuels EduLink's success is that the company is owned and operated by individuals with education backgrounds who have an inherent desire to build tools to help educators. This provides EduLink with a very specific perspective on how the tools should be designed. "We know exactly what it is like to be in a school system, and we understand the hurdles that are involved in creating an exceptional educational environment," mentions Dr. Hankinson. Secondly, the company maintains a close relationship with every school that uses its tools. This allows EduLink to have a first-hand connection with how the tools need to evolve. "We are constantly gathering feedback from our users, processing that feedback, and implementing changes to our software accordingly. We want to hear our users say, 'The software was great when we purchased it, but it is even better now,'" says Dr. Hankinson. Finally, EduLink also places an enormous level of importance on customer support.

Being one of the premier software solution vendors today, EduLink's plans involve collaborating with school district partners to create new software tools. "We listen to the needs and pain points of our school clients and work to develop tools that make their processes more automated and efficient," concludes Dr. Hankinson.