Gathering student and parent feedback for important education leader hires is rarely easy—but Michael DeFrancesco, Director of Educational Services & Human Resources at Calistoga Joint Unified School District, thinks he’s found the secret. "ThoughtExchange is honestly superior to any other type of feedback system we've ever used," he shares.

Situated in the north of California’s Napa Valley, Calistoga JUSD is a tight-knit community. It’s a small district, serving 860 students at two schools, an elementary and a junior/senior high school, and the district prides itself on its small class sizes, ample resources, and individualized instruction.

It’s important to the staff at Calistoga JUSD to be connected with the community to ensure their involvement in student success. “Our school district is 85% Latino, with a high percentage of English learners,” explains DeFrancesco.

DeFrancesco has been with Calistoga for five years and is in his 17th year in education. As Director of Educational Services & Human Resources for a small district, he wears many hats in his workday. So when it came to hiring a new Calistoga Junior/Senior High School Principal, he wanted to get the community involved in a meaningful way to ensure they picked the right candidate.

“We survey a lot,” he explains. “I'm always on that line of ‘we've done too many surveys.’” Luckily for DeFrancesco, his new Superintendent, Audra Pittman, had recently introduced new engagement technology to the district. She had participated in an Exchange and was impressed with the depth of insights our platform could capture in a short period. So when she brought ThoughtExchange to the table at Calistoga, DeFrancesco and his team were on board right away.

“I immediately thought: we could use ThoughtExchange for our principal search,” he tells us. “If we’re going to survey, let's get the community’s real feelings and responses.”

It’s not often that Calistoga finds itself looking for a new principal, so DeFrancesco wanted to ensure it was done right.

DeFrancesco wanted to know what the staff, students, and families wanted to see in a new principal, so he could ensure the interview process considered their needs when choosing a candidate. He sent the Exchange link out to the district’s staff, current and incoming students, and families, asking:

What are the most important skills, experiences, and characteristics that the ideal candidate should possess to be successful as the next Calistoga Junior/Senior High School Principal?

He was thrilled with the insights he received just over a week later. “The responses were much deeper than with our traditional engagement methods,” he says. “The Exchange data gave us more clarity into what people were expressing—versus just me looking at survey data and saying, okay, people rated this high and this low. ”

As the community began to share their thoughts with each other and the leadership team, DeFrancesco got to experience what sets ThoughtExchange apart from other community engagement methods.

Our real-time AI analytics start to work as the first few thoughts come in, so DeFrancesco could watch how the conversation unfolded. “It was fun to watch the results develop over time in the dashboard,” he shares.

With our anonymous participation and randomized, anti-bias rating features, participants can share candidly and rate each other’s thoughts based on how well they resonate—not on who shares them. “I liked the Wordclouds,” DeFrancesco explains, “and the ability to compare the quantity of keyword mentions with participant ratings to see the most important traits to the community.”

This patented system of sharing and rating ensures that leaders can see whether the group shares an idea or issue or if it’s more of a niche concern. Instead of allowing the loudest voices or vocal special interests to dominate the discussion, with ThoughtExchange, leaders can truly get to the heart of what their community supports—ensuring that the district’s decisions have the backing of their community.

We know that DeFrancesco is a survey guy, so how does ThoughtExchange compare to the standard surveys he’s used in the past? “Better on all fronts,” he tells us. “The workload related to creating the survey was much faster, because instead of having to come up with the candidate traits yourself and then type out a survey—you think of one open-ended question.”

DeFrancesco didn’t ask for community feedback lightly. He asked the community to weigh in on the new Calistoga principal hire because he wanted to deeply understand and take action on their perspectives.

Our AI analytics work quickly, giving DeFrancesco the time he needs to read through his community’s feedback. “I spent more time [than I would with a simple survey] looking at the results because of the depth of the responses,” he explains. “I wanted to give the community feedback the attention it deserves versus just looking at a graph of the highest or the lowest responses.”

However, when it came to analyzing and summarizing the data, our platform took care of that instantly. “The AI summaries were really nice to give verbiage and be able to read through, and I appreciate that the summaries were editable so that I could tinker with the wording a little bit,” he shares.

Our secure integration with OpenAI, TE Advisor, draws from your Exchange data to execute your custom prompts—like providing a concise summary of the community’s responses. DeFrancesco used our AI to summarize what each group was looking for in a principal—staff, students, and parents.