According to College Board, only 43% of college-bound seniors in the U.S. are prepared for college, with fewer than one in two students meeting "college readiness" standards in Texas.
In an effort to promote post-secondary success, McKinney Independent School District (ISD) has partnered with Hobsons to implement Naviance, the world's most widely adopted college-and career-readiness platform. The solution will help McKinney students to connect personal skills to college and career goals, track progress towards those goals through individual plans of study, and simplify the college application process.
Spanning eight campuses at McKinney – including middle and high schools – Naviance will enable educators to facilitate the college search process, career exploration and course planning for their students, and allow school counselors and administrators to track and monitor the progress of their students through Naviance's reporting and analytics tools. Using Naviance Course Planner, the school district plans to introduce an electronic version of four-year course plans to for students and families to monitor constantly to better prepare students for their college majors or careers of choice.
"Naviance will offer better college- and career-preparation resources for our students, allow them to chart a path to reach a career, and help our school and district staff communicate more effectively with students and their families about college and career planning decisions," said Tamy Smalskas, director of Career and Technical Education and Special Projects, McKinney ISD.
"We will also be using Naviance Course Planner to create four-year course plans that will help our students tie what they're doing in the classroom to their future goals."
Through Naviance Course Planner, schools can also manage more efficiently the process of tracking and reporting on CTE courses, which is a requirement in the state of Texas.
Additionally, McKinney will implement Naviance eDocs to automate the delivery of college application documents such as transcripts and letters of recommendation, thus improving operational efficiency and reducing costs associated with mailing paper documents. Naviance eDocs allows seniors to prepare and send college application documentation electronically to more than 1,700 destinations around the world.
Smalskas said that each of McKinney ISD’s high schools have already begun implementing the Career Planning and College Planning features of the Family Connection section of Naviance and that information updates will be provided at the campus level as more features are made available.
“It is our hope that within a year students and families will be utilizing the entire array of Family Connection features in the Naviance program,” said Smalskas, “including 4-year course planning, college planning, and the career inventory and planning. All the counselors have been trained on how to use the college planning and career planning component, which I expect all secondary students to begin using now.”
For additional information on McKinney ISD, contact Shane Mauldin, MISD Communications Specialist, at 469-302-4007 or smauldin@mckinneyisd.net.
