“One of the things that we were having trouble with in our district is staying on top of the kids who are continuing to have unexcused absences,” says Sara Martinez, Dropout Prevention Coordinator at Seguin ISD. 

What prompted the district to decide to implement the RaaWee system? 

“This system was more automated, it spits it out for you, instead of us churning out reports and going through person by person by person and then generating our own letters, addressing our own envelopes,” explains Martinez. 

What Will Draw You to the Program 

Part of the simplicity of RaaWee is the letters that it so easily generates. For Martinez, “Putting everything in the mail” is vital. Previously, “Before we knew it, that kid who had three unexcused absences, it took us three days to get their letter out, four days to get their letter out, and they were already at seven unexcused absences,” she recounts. 

“So, just efficiency is the way RaaWee works, and that really drew us to the program,” she notes. Before, it was “just really time consuming,” she explains. “Our office gets out and does a lot of home business—that face-to-face contact with students,” she says. 

“We pick up students in the morning when they miss the bus, or their parent’s car doesn’t start.” 

Without the RaaWee system, the old way of doing things using a time-consuming system was “taking away time from [helping people face-to-face], because we were having to generate everything manually,” explains Martinez. 

On Our Way 

“We have student support officers doing most of the pickups in the morning. They are the ones who are also doing the letters. Myself and our secretary, of course, help them because they are generating so many letters. So we were helping them to get that done,” she says. 

With RaaWee moving into place, “It’s going to be great,” she says. “Once we get it going, we can really start our interventions and let the campuses do more letters, more face-to-face contacts with parents and students. It’s going to work great!”