Pitch Playground

When nearly a third of students stopped showing up to school during the pandemic, it became clear: chronic absenteeism is not just a data point—it’s a crisis. Evan Wilson, co-founder of Scaffold Ed, is working to get to the heart of what’s keeping kids out of school. His AI-powered tool helps schools move beyond attendance charts to uncover the real stories behind student absences. By turning qualitative family feedback into tangible insights, Scaffold Ed helps educators identify and address barriers—things like delayed work permits or MetroCard access—that often go unnoticed but make a real difference in whether a student shows up.

Evan’s personal journey through the education system was shaped by early medical challenges. At the age of three, he was diagnosed with cataracts and spent much of his early life navigating school while legally blind. These experiences—often being overlooked, misjudged, and under-supported—fueled his passion for rethinking how schools engage with students and families. For Evan, data shouldn’t just explain what went wrong—it should help shape what comes next.

In this episode, Evan pitches his vision to Jin-Soo Huh, a former classroom teacher and partner at The Learning Accelerator. Together, they explore how Scaffold Ed can evolve from a powerful analysis tool into a true catalyst for change—leveraging AI not just for efficiency, but for equity. They dig into how to build trust with families, the importance of anonymity, and how schools can use real-time feedback to deliver more targeted, responsive support.

Episode Highlights:

02:04 Evan's Educational Journey
04:58 Entrepreneurial Beginnings
07:04 Understanding Chronic Absenteeism
11:06 Scaffold Ed: A Solution to Absenteeism
14:19 The Role of Data in Education
18:02 Pitching to Jin-Soo Huh 
27:16 Key Takeaways 

Links & Resources:
About the Host, Nicole Jarbo:
Nicole Jarbo is the host of Pitch Playground and the CEO of 4.0. An entrepreneur and 4.0 alumni herself, Nicole took a side hustle from $0 to $500k per year and founded a fintech startup that empowered Gen Z with their finances. She's passionate about sharing the inspiring stories of the 4.0 community and believes in work that makes the world more livable, creative, sustainable, and fun.

About 4.0:
4.0 is a hub for education innovators and social entrepreneurs reimagining the future of learning. Through mentorship, funding, and community support, we empower bold thinkers to turn their dreams into reality. To date, 4.0 has helped spark and invest in over 1,800 ideas, and our alumni have impacted over 10M students and families. We envision a future where our education system meets the needs of every family and improves life outcomes for all.

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Remember to Vote!

At the end of this season one of these entrepreneurs will receive $50,000 towards their idea.  We want to hear from you, yes YOU, to cast your vote for the idea you think should receive the cash. Sign up for our newsletter at 4pt0.org to stay tuned on when voting will open. 

What is Pitch Playground?

How could $50,000 transform learning? On Pitch Playground, we invite education innovators and social entrepreneurs to throw their best ideas at us. From technologies that build empathy to providing affordable childcare and reimagining the way we learn—this is a place for pitches from visionaries. Each episode features an intrepid edupreneur workshopping a $50,000 project to solve a critical problem in education. With support from mentors, funders, and fellow entrepreneurs we'll explore what it takes to turn dreams into reality.

At the end of the season, we award $50,000 to the best pitch we've heard on the show. We're inviting educators and social entrepreneurs to play in the sandbox with us and share their vision for the future of education. We encourage these visionaries to be BOLD—don't just think outside the box; reshape the box itself. Draw outside the lines. It's about making good ideas last longer and go further.

About the Host, Nicole Jarbo:
Nicole Jarbo is the host of Pitch Playground and the CEO of 4.0. A serial entrepreneur, former educator, and proud 4.0 alum, Nicole has a track record of building impactful ventures across a variety of industries, including education, financial technology, and media. Passionate about storytelling and innovation, she’s sharing the inspiring stories of the 4.0 community and believes in work that makes the world more livable, creative, sustainable, and fun.

About 4.0:
4.0 is a hub for education innovators and social entrepreneurs reimagining the future of learning. Through mentorship, funding, and community support, we empower bold thinkers to turn their dreams into reality. To date, 4.0 has helped spark and invest in over 1,600 ideas, and our alumni have impacted millions of students and families. We envision a future where our education system meets the needs of every family and improves life outcomes for all.

Have a Pitch to Transform the World?
We’d love to hear from you! Whether you're an educator, entrepreneur, or just passionate about changing education, reach out to share your story, ideas, or feedback. Visit us at https://pitchplayground.com/ and subscribe to Pitch Playground wherever you get your podcasts.

Nicole Jarbo:
During the pandemic, rates of chronic absenteeism nearly doubled in schools across the country. Almost a third of students weren't showing up to school.
Evan Wilson:
Most of the time it comes from things like disengagement, barriers to coming to school, reasons why they're not coming to school that relate to the overall school climate.
Nicole Jarbo:
In the case of one urban school, they started to see a pattern.
Evan Wilson:
The team at a school recognized that students weren't coming to school on certain days of the week.
Nicole Jarbo:
They reached out to students and families for feedback.
Evan Wilson:
They kept seeing MetroCards pop up.
Nicole Jarbo:
At this school they supplied MetroCards to the students. By analyzing the feedback, the team realized ...
Evan Wilson:
That students' parents were using their MetroCards on certain days because they needed to get to work.
Evan Wilson:
And for families that meant prioritizing either a parent keeping their job or a child going to school.
Nicole Jarbo:
That gave the school a very tangible thing to work on.
Evan Wilson:
If you gave extra MetroCards to students, you could see that jump in attendance pretty clearly.
Nicole Jarbo:
Hey, I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo. This is Pitch Playground from 4.0. Today on the show we have Evan Wilson, co-founder of Scaffold Ed.
Evan Wilson:
We help schools find patterns in family feedback to get kids back in school. There's always a story behind that empty seat.
Nicole Jarbo:
This season we'll hear from 10 education entrepreneurs who are re-imagining the future of learning, and they get the opportunity to pitch their idea to funders who can help them strengthen their pitch. Today we're bringing back Jin-Soo Huh from The Learning Accelerator to workshop Evan's idea.
Jin-Soo Huh:
Chronic absenteeism is just a huge problem right now. How do you see Scaffold Ed playing a role in solving some of these deeper issues around schools not relevant for me?
Nicole Jarbo:
Remember, at the end of this season, you'll have the opportunity to vote for which idea you think should win $50,000.
Evan's early experiences with education were largely colored by some medical challenges he had.
Evan Wilson:
So at the age of three, two and a half, I was diagnosed with cataracts at that age, which was incredibly, incredibly rare for someone that young. I was functionally blind or legally blind at the age of three into four and early into being five years old. So that really changed how the end of preschool was for me. I was starting to not learn my letters and starting to learn visually and starting to learn braille and kind of coloring that experience. And then thankfully I had a great team of doctors that were able to reverse that and save my vision.
Nicole Jarbo:
As Evan transitioned to elementary school, the lasting impacts of those medical challenges continued to follow him.
Evan Wilson:
I think one of the earliest memories of that was in first grade where I was put into a specialized reading group for students who were dyslexic or just were struggling to read, largely because I was a shy kid. I didn't really know how to interact. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and really what came out of that was I was actually reading at a fifth grade reading level in the first grade, but because the school didn't really know what to do with me and didn't really know how to interact and engage with my parents, I was put in a place where it created a challenge for me to interact in school.
Nicole Jarbo:
Once Evan reached the sixth grade, he got a scholarship to transition from a public school to a private school.
Evan Wilson:
And I think those problems got even worse there. I was tracked into non-advanced classes. There were a lot of instances where had I been better at advocating for myself or the school had a better relationship with my family, I could have been put into more challenging educational experiences. Luckily that turned around by the time I got into high school when I was really able to apply myself. But young Evan was pretty jaded by education from the jump.
Nicole Jarbo:
Evan's co-founder at Scaffold Ed had similar educational experiences.
Evan Wilson:
And he's the quieter one out of the two of us. Being a nerdy guy growing up in Southwest Philadelphia who loved playing Dungeons & Dragons, he was able to find teachers that he could relate to, but he could have had so much of a better educational experience if there was a more direct way for his school to support him and his family.
Nicole Jarbo:
It was difficult at times for Evan's parents to navigate the school system to get him the support he needed.
Evan Wilson:
So for me, being the quiet kid who generally did decently in school or pretty well in a lot of cases, being busy parents or being a busy school, a lot of the time kids like myself got overlooked when it came to figuring out what specific needs I had and what could help me thrive in the school. And I think for both of my parents, relating to other families and finding community in many ways could be a challenge, especially for my mom being an immigrant. Relating to the U.S. public education system as being something that's not anything of what you grew up with also creates challenges in advocacy. You don't feel like you can advocate in a lot of ways, and I think that does change the way that I went through school.
Nicole Jarbo:
But something Evan inherited from his family was an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for social impact.
Evan Wilson:
My family is a family of entrepreneurs in many ways. My aunt was one of the founders of a nonprofit in Philly that helped refugees secure housing. My grandfather was a huge inspiration on my dad's side. Back in the 30s, and this is an important story to me, and he was a young Black man in Newcastle, PA, so just outside of Pittsburgh and was a tinkerer from a young age. And what he told me, he was born in 1923 during the Great Depression, an older Polish engineer at the factory that he was sweeping the floors at, taught him how to fix refrigerators, which then influenced him to join the army and start working on tanks, which changed his life.
My mom, despite working her full-time job, always had other entrepreneurial endeavors. She early on, it was another social impact business, she was selling handbags made out of recycled juice pouches from the Philippines. My mom had a connection with a village near where she grew up. She would get fair trade bags from there, and then we'd sell them at fairs. So from the age of seven, and my mother is a great business woman because she said, okay, this little seven-year-old can attract a bunch of people to the booth.
Nicole Jarbo:
Evan's passion for entrepreneurship ignited at a very young age, and he started businesses wherever he saw an opportunity.
Evan Wilson:
I was the kid in school who was selling candy and getting in trouble for it. I was the kid who was figuring out different entrepreneurial endeavors to undertake. Everything from running a taco stand randomly near my high school just to make some extra money to then in school starting an organization that helped people learn entrepreneurship. I think for me, entrepreneurship has always been about hustle. Got involved in the Philly startup community at 14 years old through cold emailing, just showing up to meetups just for the free dinner and then networking from there. So I think a lot of it has been hustle and tinkering are really how I think about entrepreneurship.
Nicole Jarbo:
Evan is now dedicating his love of entrepreneurship and social impact to addressing the problem of chronic absenteeism in schools. Will you talk a little bit about what chronic absenteeism is and how it actually impacts everywhere from the higher level school system to the actual student?
Evan Wilson:
I mean, for a student, really what chronic absenteeism means if a student is missing more than 10% of academic days in a school year, they're chronically absent. That's generally how it's thought about. And the thing that after spending a lot of time working on chronic absenteeism that we begin to understand is, and many people who focus in this area do is that there's always a story behind that empty seat. And those stories come from a lot of the deeper challenges that we have in education. There are some challenges that are just, hey, sometimes students need a reminder to come to school, but most of the time it comes from things like disengagement, barriers to coming to school, reasons why they're not coming to school that relate to the overall school climate. It's a very, very important problem because it impacts every aspect of how a student perceives their school and feels welcome in their school.
Nicole Jarbo:
During the first year of the COVID pandemic, almost 15 million students nationwide were considered chronically absent.
Evan Wilson:
So zooming out to the society-level impact or the system-level impact, the thing that a lot of people don't know is that schools' funding is hurt by absenteeism. If you estimate the impact of absenteeism in the 2023 school year, so not COVID, but a few years after COVID, it's estimated that schools lost across the country about $70 billion in funding for students. That's not even counting enrollment issues that are happening because families are disengaging, and what that creates for us is this vicious cycle where schools are losing funding because students aren't coming for a variety of different reasons, they're able to do less because they have less resources. Families lose trust because their school is not really meeting their needs, and then because families are losing trust, students aren't coming to school.
And you can see how that cycle really gets to the heart of why absenteeism is an existential crisis for public schooling in the U.S. and impacts every single person in the school system. It's really discouraging for a superintendent or a principal or a teacher who's working really, really hard to get students in school to see that that is not really moving the needle and they're losing funding because of it.
Nicole Jarbo:
There are many reasons students might not be showing up to school. Mental health, transportation challenges or simply feeling disconnected can all play a part.
Student:
I don't feel safe there, so why would I go?
Student:
I studied all night for that exam and still got a bad grade.
Student:
I'm never going to use this stuff we're learning, so why bother?
Nicole Jarbo:
And sometimes it's what's happening at home that keeps kids away.
Parent:
My health isn't great right now and I need help around the house.
Parent:
Our laundry machine broke. We can't afford to fix it.
Parent:
We've moved three times this year. It's been hard to keep any kind of routine.
Nicole Jarbo:
For educators, chronic absenteeism isn't just frustrating. It's discouraging.
Educator:
What's the point in planning lessons if no one even shows up?
Educator:
Of course, test scores are down. Half the class hasn't been here.
Nicole Jarbo:
Part of the problem with chronic absenteeism is that many people don't even see it as an issue.
Evan Wilson:
I remember talking to the superintendent who was running a medium-sized district in the Midwest, and he told me that essentially he needed to prove to his school board that absenteeism was an issue because in many ways it's painted as an issue that's for inner city schools with kids who look like you and I, Black and Brown students who are just not coming to school because it's something that's deemed as a cultural problem.
Nicole Jarbo:
Data tells us that students of color, English learners and students with disabilities are more likely to be chronically absent, but data alone doesn't tell us why. Behind every absence, there's a deeper story that goes beyond the numbers.
Evan Wilson:
I think part of that is supplying the school board, the superintendent, everyone else in the district, including families with very real stories of absenteeism because we all learn best from stories and very real solutions that get to the heart of what they need.
Nicole Jarbo:
That's where Evan's product Scaffold Ed comes in.
Evan Wilson:
At Scaffold Ed, we help schools find patterns in family feedback to get kids back in school. What that really means, that we're addressing chronic absenteeism in school, so students not coming to class or not coming to school at high rates. Schools, districts, teachers have told us across the country that they don't really know where to start when it comes to absenteeism, and that's really what we're supplying. We're giving them clarity over the specific needs that their families, their students, and even in many cases, their teachers have so they can create solutions that actually move the needle in their districts.
Nicole Jarbo:
In many cases, the reasons for students not showing up to school are financial barriers.
Evan Wilson:
I heard a story from a principal who through talking to students who were chronically absent, 11th and 12th graders mainly, they found out that one issue that was causing chronic absence was actually a lag in work permits being processed. So a lot of people know that work permits for people who are under the age of 18 get processed through schools. For this principal, they realized that in the area that their school was in, a lot of students needed to work because they needed to support their families, but they needed to get jobs under the table because the school and the district were taking a long time to process their work permits, which meant that they became chronically absent. For that principal it became, okay, let's make sure that we can dedicate the time of people that we already have to just make sure that this is solved so that number of students can come to school more regularly because they want to.
Nicole Jarbo:
Identifying patterns and data allow Evan and his team to uncover the stories behind what's keeping kids out of school.
Evan Wilson:
These seemingly small problems are very, very important to the people who are having them, and that's part of the power that we really want to bring to the entire country, the entire world. But we'll start at the country.
Nicole Jarbo:
Can you kind of walk us through how Scaffold Ed works?
Evan Wilson:
We act like a research team and really a co-pilot for your school, your district, your classroom, whoever's adopting Scaffold Ed. The reason I say that is because we replace that weeks of effort of analyzing climate surveys and all of this other qualitative data and parent feedback that schools have and turn it into a few seconds of our AI tool going into that information, finding themes, and not only just themes over what families and students are feeling.
Nicole Jarbo:
Climate surveys and pulse checks are tools used by schools to gather parent and student feedback. The responses are qualitative data that is capturing people's thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and experiences.
Evan Wilson:
So for example, student burnout is a common theme that we're seeing. Transportation issues for families, peer relationship challenges because students are having issues with their classmates are some of the themes that we're pulling out, and that's really the important part for school decision makers to see, "Okay, we know that burnout is an issue. Here are specific challenges that parents or students have named that's related to that." So Scaffold Ed, what it looks like in practice is you upload that file and within the next 30 seconds you already have this information at your fingertips.
Nicole Jarbo:
Data in the education system generally falls into two buckets: leading indicators and lagging indicators. Right now, most decisions are based on lagging indicators, data that tells us what's already happened after the fact. Things like test scores, grades or attendance reports.
Evan Wilson:
A lot of the time, schools don't get those numbers until the following school year, in some cases even later than that. What that doesn't help is a principal or a teacher or district administrator making a decision today or even next month around what they need to be doing for their school. So for most schools, those lagging indicators are also the things that they're getting evaluated on. If you're talking about the school board, if you're talking about the state, if you're talking about our federal government, especially in this era that we're currently in with the new administration, these are the things that people point to around how our schools are doing.
Nicole Jarbo:
Leading indicators are predictive measurements. They help tell a story about what might happen in the future, especially if certain patterns continue or specific actions are taken.
Evan Wilson:
The problem is that that system is rigged because schools don't really have the leading indicators that they need over, if I take this step, is it in a direction that we can verify is needed by our community? The best ways that they have of doing that are things that we're all familiar with, whether it's an employee feedback survey, whether it's a community climate survey where they're sending that out to thousands of parents getting a certain response rate and then dedicating someone's time at the district or sometimes hopefully a team of people to sort through all of that and find patterns in it. And I've heard horror stories of that, but that's the best that they have for really understanding, okay, what do our families need in the district and why leading indicators are so important is that they create buy-in.
So when it comes to resource planning, if I could bring to our school board what families are thinking and feeling because that's what they care about, if I could bring that to them to justify what decisions we're making, it can go a lot farther than some of the lagging indicators that we have that really are just accusatory in many ways for districts. Or I should say they feel accusatory because it's saying, "Hey, you failed this year because that number went down instead of going up." The real human stories have a lot more nuance and that's something that they can work with.
Nicole Jarbo:
That might mean offering extra MetroCards or helping students process work permits like we've talked about. But it can also mean being proactive, addressing issues like bullying or disengagement before they lead to students missing school. Can you share some stories of impact or insights that you all have gleaned from your work to date?
Evan Wilson:
We are over the next 12 months, going to be able to make over 100,000 families feel heard, which is what we are really working towards, and that has incredible impact for districts, and that's how we really see that impact because that's what superintendents, principals, teachers, families themselves have asked of us, and that's what we're able to provide pretty immediately.
Nicole Jarbo:
What would the Scaffold Ed team do if they win that $50,000?
Evan Wilson:
What $50,000 would enable us to do is go from acting like a research team, gathering insight and giving it to these decision makers at their fingertips. What $50,000 can do is help us embrace the future and give them essentially the power of AI agents to start to make use and to start to implement solutions for these challenges that don't require any additional district support.
Nicole Jarbo:
Right now, functioning as a research team, Scaffold Ed is working directly with teachers and administrators to uncover patterns in the data they're already collecting. Looking ahead, Evan and his team are exploring how AI agents could join the process, tools that could work directly with families to implement solutions for those challenges. Now Evan gets his chance to pitch his vision to Jin-Soo Huh.
Jin-Soo Huh:
I'm a former classroom teacher, so know the importance of education, have seen students who are chronically absent and have worked on ways to try to engage them back in there as well.
Nicole Jarbo:
Jin-Soo is also a partner at The Learning Accelerator.
Jin-Soo Huh:
The Learning Accelerator is a national nonprofit and we seek to make the sector learn faster. Chronic absenteeism is a huge challenge right now, and also, of course, the advent of AI is something that we've been really looking at, so we're also trying to think through ways of how do we get AI to actually help and not hinder schools right now.
Nicole Jarbo:
Jin-Soo and Evan dig into the mechanics of Evan's idea and whether it's truly viable. As Evan continues to pitch this tool to funders, there are some key questions he'll need to answer. What makes this better than a traditional pulse check, climate survey or Google form? How does his team plan to address the biases that often show up in AI systems? And maybe most importantly, how will they build trust and get buy-in from students and parents? Here's their conversation.
Jin-Soo Huh:
I'd like to know a little bit. Chronic absenteeism is just a huge problem right now. Some students have gotten lost in the system and just fallen through the cracks. Others have just been disengaged, and so they're not coming because they don't find school relevant or things like that. Data is a powerful tool, but ultimately data can just shine a light on what the challenges are or other things like that. How do you see Scaffold Ed playing a role in solving some of these deeper issues around school's not relevant for me, transportation might be hard, family engagement might be challenging? How do you see your tool playing a role in solving those challenges?
Evan Wilson:
I've spoken with school CFOs, with other folks within districts who are on the front lines of making this more tactical and a lot of these approaches more tactical, truancy officers, folks like that. And for them, what it immediately provides is the ability to prioritize the decisions that they're already making around students, especially in an era where school districts are losing resources, figure out, "Okay, where are the key areas where we want to focus first?"
Phase two for us is saying, okay, knowing that schools have less resources, how can the information that we're collecting and using serve as a foundation for this next generation of things like AI agents, which is exactly what we're building towards in the future, to help give school districts not only a research team, which is what we're doing right now. But also an extra set of hands to help enact some of these more specific challenges that they might be dealing with when it comes to transportation and bus scheduling or MetroCard access or peer relationship challenges that students are having.
Jin-Soo Huh:
I'm curious to hear from you. I've been out of the school systems for about five years now, but I know that some things that I've seen other schools use is we'll hack systems together, so we might use a Google form for a pulse check or other things like that. What would you say makes Scaffold Ed better than these kinds of systems, like quick check-ins even in person or doing a Google form for students to fill out or for parents to fill out?
Evan Wilson:
Yeah, that's a great question. That's exactly ... A lot of what we've built is informed by that and informed by data practices that we commonly see in quantitative data, but the thing that's also important to us is approaching it with the level of humility that says, "We know that people like the tools that they already have. If you've been using Google Forms to do this, we don't want to take you away from that." That's why Scaffold Ed, to get started is just uploading the information you already have. It's adding to your knowledge hub, and that's why for pulse check-ins, we're not asking parents or anybody else to sign up for the platform. It's a link that we generate that you can drop into Remind, or any other communication channels that you have. We're approaching it from the perspective of we are a knowledge hub and then eventually a solutions hub later, but we don't want to monopolize any sort of communication or engagement that schools are already having or teachers are already having with families.
Jin-Soo Huh:
That's great. I love that you're trying to lower the barrier. One thing that I was curious about is there's a lot of potential with AI, but there are also some potential drawbacks with AI. One of the things that is a concern about AI is the bias that might be built in whether it's more male-focused, maybe against certain races or others. How do you make sure that the AI is being used in a way that's responsible and in a way that mitigates some of these biases?
Evan Wilson:
For our first iteration of the product that we're launching, all of the responses from families and students are anonymous, so we're not bringing in any other information, and that was a deliberate step, and it's something that for a lot of folks is somewhat of a hurdle to get over. But for us, what we are curious about and what we're seeing is if we're submitting or collecting anonymous information, what kind of themes can be picked up if we're not necessarily looking at specific demographics or student groups or other folks within that? As far as the model itself and how we use the AI to prevent the bias, we want to start with anonymity first and then from there work in responsive ways to add in additional context and information. We're prioritizing anonymity to also increase responses from parents and feeling like they can share more transparently. That is something where schools can essentially then engage based on those topics.
Jin-Soo Huh:
So if I'm hearing correctly, it's just kind of like saying, "Hey, here's what we're hearing overall and here are the major themes that were surfacing. Do you want to go and investigate this? It's probably a good idea." And then in phase two, there'll be recommendations or other things like that that you'll be able to do on there.
Evan Wilson:
Yeah, and that's exactly in response to what we heard from everyone from school board leadership level down to teachers and families themselves, so getting more real around what specifically is the challenge in my community, because a lot of these solutions are hyperlocal so that they can begin to engage with families on terms where families immediately feel heard. That's one of the key benefits that we see, and even at the superintendent and the administrator level, the main way that they're hearing this information right now are the PTO meetings and town halls and other things that are a little bit more ... Certain voices get elevated in those environments, and superintendents and a lot of other folks who are at the very high levels of leadership want to hear other voices, and from those they can start to engage better or have other people in the district engage better around priorities, but currently a lot of those voices are getting lost.
Jin-Soo Huh:
I'm curious then, how do you then incentivize parents and students, especially those that are disengaged, that are chronically absent to be able to do these pulse checks or answer so that you can get that data to really elevate those voices?
Evan Wilson:
The perspective that we started from is that no one likes to do surveys, and from there we've worked from how do you deconstruct what a survey is and what it means for a lot of these different individuals. We've incorporated things like speech-to-text to answer those questions to make it really easy for a parent to reply to these check-ins. So long story short, we're trying to reduce friction in the current paradigm of collecting based on surveys. Transparency is another piece, so when a family member or a student responds, they immediately get a copy or a summary of the responses from other individuals. Just the themes and summaries of those themes so they can see, okay, I'm not just shouting in the ether, which is another problem that families reported to us about the traditional surveying model.
Jin-Soo Huh:
I'm going to do some reflection now. This is fascinating to learn about. I'm a huge data nerd if you can't tell, and I appreciate, how do we just empower different folks from educators, students, district administrators, parents with data and make schools better and learning better overall? Something that I heard from you over and over again is how do we lower the barrier for this? I'm excited for your phase two and your roadmap as you think about once you have this information now what? And being able to make some recommendations for whether it's teachers, principals or district leaders on what's next on here. I also am really intrigued by the anonymous feature, and I actually was a little bit taken aback when you first said that because I was like, "Then how do you know which student to work with?" And I think that was actually really interesting when you said that it does create a safe space and people are able to be more honest, it elevates different voices.
And so that insight is brought up overall, and then it's up to the school team or whoever is the actor to then move on it based on those insights. So that actually made me pause in a good way. I think the other things I think for you all just to think about as you're going down this road, I'll mention this to all [inaudible 00:26:33] right now. Budgets are a little bit hectic right now. I do think chronic absenteeism is a major priority, and that's something that we're seeing consistently in surveys, so I do think there's a market for it, and if people are going to prioritize something, it's this. I think the more stories that you're able to get with these pilots of these concrete ways of, "This is how we use the data, this is the insights that Scaffold Ed elevated up from these data sources, and here's how we acted on it to actually reduce chronic absenteeism," I think that's going to be the most compelling thing for superintendents or principals to be like, "Yes, I need this tool immediately on there."
Nicole Jarbo:
As Evan continues to refine his plan for Scaffold Ed, the more stories he can gather that will illustrate the real human impact of his idea, the better. Thank you so much Jin-Soo for joining us on the show again and Evan for sharing your pitch. Now, here are a few takeaways I want to leave you with from what we've learned today.
Evan Wilson:
Families lose trust because their school is not really meeting their needs, and then because families are losing trust, students aren't coming to school.
Nicole Jarbo:
Trust. How do we work towards rebuilding that between the education system and families across the U.S.?
Evan Wilson:
In many ways, it's painted as an issue with kids who look like you and I, Black and Brown students who are just not coming to school because it's something that's deemed as a cultural problem.
Nicole Jarbo:
There is always a story behind that empty seat. Make sure that you aren't missing what that story really is.
Jin-Soo Huh:
Something that I heard from you over and over again is how do we lower the barrier for this?
Nicole Jarbo:
In an already resource-constrained system, work to meet students, parents, teachers, and administrators where they are. That's it for today. This has been Pitch Playground from 4.0. I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo. Learn more about the podcast at pitchplayground.com. Next up, we'll be hearing from Jonathan Santos Silva, the founder of The Liber Institute.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
So The Liber Institute's mission is to embolden and equip Indigenous young people, families, and educators to transform schools and the communities they serve.