Crosby ISD faced a challenge that many K-12 districts across America are struggling with: recruiting and retaining exceptionally qualified teachers. “It became a bigger issue after COVID-19, so we decided to tackle it.” She and her team proposed that changing the academic calendar may provide solutions to their recruitment and retention efforts, and decided to put the idea out to their community partners.

Alongside Crosby ISD’s Director of Communications and Community Relations, Brett Birkinbine, Superintendent Patterson launched an initial Exchange to ask the community, “How can we be creative with our academic calendar to retain and recruit exceptional teachers?”

Beginning with this Exchange in November, Patterson’s team ran four subsequent qualitative and quantitative surveys on the ThoughtExchange platform, garnering over 8,000 participants.

“After years of trying to get feedback, we had the most engagement using ThoughtExchange,” shares Superintendent Patterson. “We've not had engagement nearly as high with other surveys.” She was also impressed with the quality of engagement using ThoughtExchange. “I’ve never experienced a platform that allowed us to truly engage people like this," she explains. "The platform allows participants to build on each other’s thoughts. Two heads are better than one, right? Using ThoughtExchange, all of these brilliant minds come together."

Using our platform, Superintendent Patterson and Birkinbine were confident that they were capturing all the perspectives needed to make the right decisions. “A parent thinks differently than a community member who doesn't have students in the district, who thinks differently from the teacher in the classroom—so bringing everyone together to solve one problem was a beautiful sight,” says Superintendent Patterson.

The idea that rose to the top for the Crosby community was a 4-day school week. Birkinbine explains that while their participants had other good ideas, like a longer fall or spring break, the rating system put the 4-day week in a clear lead. “4-day was one of the ideas that truly bubbled up—it's the rating mechanism that’s a stand-out feature of ThoughtExchange,” he shares.

Their initial Exchange identified the idea that most of the Crosby ISD community supported, so with their follow-up engagements, Superintendent Patterson and Birkinbine set out to understand the obstacles to setting up a 4-day school week. Along with a series of staff meetings and town halls, they were able to use ThoughtExchage with different groups to pull together a holistic view of perspectives.

With the ability to gather fast qualitative responses through the ThoughtExchange platform, they could easily see where to focus their problem-solving efforts. “The challenges arose with food insecurity and daycare,” Superintendent Patterson explains, “so we knew what to overcome.”

Superintendent Patterson and her team set to work on solutions for these two key challenges, but they also provided answers to the minority of people who were opposed to the 4-day week. “The opposition was apparent in the survey,” she confirms, “so when I did face-to-face meetings at town halls, I was able to have answers ready.” By truly understanding the thinking behind the opposition, she could assure them that she had heard and considered their perspectives.

“When it comes to change, we have to understand that it's difficult for some,” she shares. “But when you know you're doing right by kids, sometimes you've got to forge ahead and try it out and see.” Understanding the “why” behind both groups—those for the change and those against it—put Superintendent Patterson in the position to make the right decisions and acknowledge her whole community.

As Superintendent Patterson’s team continued to engage their district on the 4-day school week plan, the task of interpreting the data fell to Birkinbine. With a total of over 3,500 comments to sift through, what could have been a difficult, drawn-out process was made easy with ThoughtExchange’s in-depth and intuitive qualitative data analysis. "It's just the ease of use,” he shares. “Every morning, I would get into the data and send Superintendent Patterson some of the top comments, and that was great because the product ranked them for us."

Birkinbine especially appreciated the Summary—an AI-powered outline of the community conversation that captures their sentiment and top-ranked ideas in a short paragraph. “The summary made it easy not only to see the numbers but also what the majority of people were saying. It was a guidepost, showing the direction the conversation was going in.”

In his years of engagement experience, Birkinbine has used other survey platforms to capture community voices—and in his opinion, there’s no comparison when it comes to his time.

From Superintendent Patterson’s perspective, ThoughtExchange allows her to focus on what she does best—solving problems. “The advantage of ThoughtExchange is being able to succinctly show us what’s on the minds of our people so that we can spend time more working on overcoming those challenges—as opposed to spending time to dig deeper and continue to go back for clarifying feedback, or trying to guess what people are thinking. ThoughtExchange removes all of that guesswork.”

ThoughtExchange’s ability to capture and analyze a broad range of perspectives also gave Crosby’s board the data confidence they needed to pass the initiative. “In February 2023, the board approved a four-day hybrid calendar for the 23/24 school year,” Superintendent Patterson beams.

With the data she needed in hand, Superintendent Patterson looked to community partners to help with solutions. The first challenge she tackled was childcare. Her team built a partnership with the YMCA of Greater Houston to provide students with low-cost childcare for Fridays, the day the community had chosen as the day off.

The YMCA agreed to come to a centrally located Crosby ISD campus every week for a fee of $75 per student per month. The parents who needed childcare agreed to the cost and signed up their children, but due to a generous donation from another local Crosby business, Friendly Ford, the district was able to offer the program for free.

“We are in such a phenomenal community!” Superintendent Patterson smiles. “With the remaining dollars, we took the students on field trips. We're near NASA so we took them to the Space Center Houston, the Zoo, and found all types of really neat experiences. That was a hit.”

Next, Superintendent Patterson looked for solutions for people experiencing food insecurity. For this initiative, Crosby ISD partnered with the Houston Food Bank and made it a teaching moment for the district’s youth.

“Every Thursday, we distributed free groceries to whoever showed up, providing free meals to our community,” she explains. “We also wanted to take that opportunity to teach our children to be service-minded. So our high school students distributed food to our community members weekly.”

It’s clear the Crosby ISD community is happy, and they’ve shared that with Superintendent Patterson and her team—even the detractors. “Some of the same people who were against the plan were also for it once the school year started, saying, ‘Oh my gosh! This is the best ever.’”

And Crosby ISD’s initial challenge of teacher recruitment and retention? The 4-day week has had the intended impact on their numbers. Superintendent Patterson explains: “When we started the next school year, we had a 70% improvement in our vacancy fill rate—meaning we filled 70% more positions than the year before. At the end of the first 4-day school year, our retention is 85%, an increase of 5% on the previous school year.”

Numbers like that don’t lie. Superintendent Patterson credits ThoughtExchange for allowing her to meaningfully include her staff, students, parents, and community members and truly understand their perspectives. “We truly used ThoughtExchange throughout the whole process in different ways,” she shares.

The 4-day week is a success at Crosby ISD, and now Superintendent Patterson and her team are busy capturing their community’s voices for other important decisions like bond elections—and even for everyday ones. “At this point, we use ThoughtExchange for everything, even simple surveys,” she smiles.

Crosby ISD is the largest district in Texas to adopt a four-day week, and its success demonstrates the power of community-driven decision-making. Superintendent Patterson says it best: