In early August, PowerSchool, one of the giants of education technology, with a platform for K-12 that supports thirty-two million students in over seventy countries around the world celebrated their twentieth anniversary at their Folsom, California headquarters. It was a day of festivities, food and presentations of global and community impact.

LeiLani Cauthen, the CEO and Publisher of the Learning Counsel, a leading edtech media, events and research company also with headquarters nearby in Sacramento, California, stopped in to offer congratulations and chat with PowerSchool’s CEO, Hardeep Gulati.

Mr. Gulati shared his pride at being able to celebrate twenty years of growth that has directly impacted the innovation within K-12 education. “We have one-thousand, three-hundred employees who have all worked in education for, in some cases twenty to even forty-five years,” he stated. “What’s exciting about that is the experience-base is more than ten-thousand years of K-12 knowledge and expertise in all different aspects of education. I feel that factor is what makes us different and helps us be the leader for providing a unified platform for school districts in the U.S., Canada and across the world.”

He further shared his view with Mrs. Cauthen that there are lot of startups coming into education with innovative ideas, but they may not have the expertise and understanding of how grading has been done, how special education needs to be handled, what the different challenges you might think of around graduation, what are the actual concerns. “Being a valuable partner to school districts takes experience, plus innovation and know-how. The experience and passion of the team who really got us here is what we’re celebrating, and we’re also celebrating giving back to this local community,” stated Mr. Gulati.

During the afternoon activities, children of employees could be seen running this way and that, involved in treasure hunts and then doing an “hour of code” using code.org, which was recently integrated with all PowerSchool systems so teachers can employ all coding lesson content with one click within PowerSchool’s Unified Classroom platform. 

There is no question that coding is a new language of learning and is seeing explosive growth on school campuses. Mr. Gulati shared further details of PowerSchool’s partnership with Code.Org. “This is an effort which we’re taking to the next level in our systems,” he stated. “Our founder, Greg Porter, actually started writing the code about the student system when he was in high school. We understand the power of knowing how to code. This is why we are hoping that we will create more kids that work with technology and we’re even going to have an internship for high schoolers in the community that allows them to create more innovation which, hopefully, can change education and a lot of other industries.”

Mrs Cauthen and Mr. Gulati spoke further concerning how the PowerSchool platform continues to transform the way classroom and school district data is being used for real-time insights and analysis.