What is the real value of RaaWee? According to Tony De La Rosa, Supervisor of Student Attendance for Midland ISD, “It allows our campuses to map out who they need to work with as far as students are concerned,” he says. 

“Before, we were depending on was our student software database which was kind of like pulling needles in a haystack. There was really no direction. It’s provided us with that direction that we need to be able to help out parents and students,” says De La Rosa. 

What’s the Best Thing You Can Do to Help A Student or Parent? 

“The best thing that you can do to help out a particular student or parent that’s having issues, and also to help out your campus, is to get right on top of it right away,” De La Rosa explains. “The sooner the better.” 

“With RaaWee, it’s been able to allow us to communicate with these parents sooner than later,” says De La Rosa. 

“A lot of times whenever we are working with them, every parent and every student has a story. It allows us to be able to pinpoint what type of in-house resources we have available.” “If we don’t have in-house resources that can help them, then we’ll definitely go out to the community and try to set them up with what we have in our community,” he says. 

Confronting Some Real-Life Issues 

“Sometimes, a lot of these students fall under that certain criteria, such as being homeless or being pregnant or just extenuating circumstances that prevent that student from going to school on a daily basis,” explains De La Rosa. 

“We have a lot of families that are coming from out of state or from different school districts and a lot of them are just—well, they simply don’t have any viable means of transportation or anything like that.” 

According to De La Rosa, with a real-time system where no student falls through the cracks, helping those in need has made a real difference: “We’ve been able to work with our transportation department to be able to assist those families and those students to get them to where they need to be,” he says.