EduPais

Our product is a technology platform that serves schools through teacher professional development, SMS communication, and data mining.

In São Paulo, the dropout rate has reached 20% in the transition from middle school to high school. The high level of economic competition in São Paulo demands that students enter the workforce with at least a high school degree. If the dropout rate in São Paulo continues, then the current 15.7% of Brazilian 15-19 year olds not in education, employment, or training will further eclipse the OECD average of 7.2%, and cause Brazil to fall behind economically.

At eduPAIS, we believe that engaging parents in schools and increasing their participation in students’ educational journeys can improve academic performance and reduce student dropout. We achieve this through data intelligence, customized text messages, and professional development. Currently, parents rely on in-person meetings, or handwritten agendas from teachers to communicate with schools. One third of Brazilian parents and students use non-education platforms, such as Whatsapp and Facebook, to communicate with teachers outside of the classroom . This suggests a huge opportunity to increase exposure to a structured educational platforms and products that serve parents, teachers, and schools.

We interviewed dozens of parents, principals, pedagogical coordinators, and teachers in Brazil, Turkey, Chile, and USA, studied the importance of family engagement, and developed the necessary tools to improve communication. We found that administrators and parents need a more efficient means of communication that does not burden either party. In addition, we tested our prototype receiving feedback about eduPAIS’ functionalities, UX, and the navigation process. Our product provides a technology platform that decreases teachers’ time spent writing in each child’s agenda. Additionally, eduPAIS offers a holistic data-backed solution and professional development curriculum to increase parent engagement, reduce students’ dropout rates, and improve academic performance.

Our business model is subscription based. We will charge a monthly fee for schools and school districts according to the number of the student per schools. This model is common across competitors and EdTech companies in the education sector. We plan to pilot the solution in three schools in the first year. Although our focus is public schools, in the second year, we will expand to private schools to make our company sustainable. The revenue from private schools will sustain eduPAIS until we enter public tenders and expand our business for the third year.

1. Teacher professional development will consist of 2 minute videos at HTPC that will include socio emotional learning skills for students. 

2. SMS communication will allow the pedagogical coordinator to send personalized messages about attendance, performance and behavior of the student, school campaigns to communicate the dates of the bi-monthly meeting, or to confirm attendance, short surveys for parents to assess the school performance and culture.

3. Data Mining and Clusters Analysis is our behind the scenes analytical approach by using family demographic information, satisfaction surveys, SMS frequency between families and the school, and student performance to categorize parents.  

Currently, parents and teachers do not have the strategies to communicate or the access to resources to work with families and create an inclusive school culture. We aim to equip parents with data regarding individual student performance (grades, attendance, behavior) via SMS to increase touch points between parents and schools and inform parents about their children’s education. Considering the amount of low-income parents and low-cost technological innovation, there is a significant opportunity to educate and empower parents.

Our goal in the next 12 months is to test our solution in some Brazilian public schools and collectfeedbacks. We are already in contact with some interested professionals, the tests should begin in the coming months.

Every year in Brazil, 5 million adolescents are disapproved or drop out of school. According to our research, our solution can impact a significant number of these people. We believe that in up to 5 years, we will have helped the Brazilian government to reduce the number of evasions and failures in school and reduce costs in the thousands of dollars.

Our clients are mainly governments. The solution is delivered as a SAS (software as service). We want to retain customer through the cost reduction that our solution generates. We will directly impact how families relate to school, increasing parental engagement, reducing dropout and the number of school failures.

In Brazil alone, every year 48 million students go through basic education. This is the size of our market today. Of these 48 million, 5 million have problems of disapproval and evasion. We want to help the government tackle this problem.In the future we want to reach other countries. Our solution is mainly based on the use of SMS and low cost solutions, so it is not necessary to download any type of application.

We are starting in the state of São Paulo, so we expect to reach 2 million students in the first years of operation. In 3 years we already want to be in all the Brazilian territory.

From Brazil, we have a team member, Andre, is working at the department of education, and David, who is working at an education app company as a computer programmer. Ricardo was a former government official in Chile. Victoria taught in middle schools for 2 years in northern California. 

Our revenues will come from the subscription model in which schools or school districts pay a monthly fee for the service in a 10 month annual contract. The price per school depends on the size of the school and the amount of students. For the purpose of the initial budget, we consider an average school in the city of Guarulhos, SP,  with 500 students and a teaching team of 50 people. The monthly fee per school would be $1,000 USD, about $2 USD a month per student. Our revenues during second year will be $300,000 USD with 30 schools. For the third year, we are expecting to expand to 100 schools. Moreover, Table 2 demonstrates that the cost per school in the third year will be $8,631 USD, and that the revenues per school will be $10,000 USD. Thus the estimated margin percentage is 15>#/span###

We believe that the product we are developing is all about this program. We expect that we can share a lot of good with the participants in the coming months.

This is a product whose customers are mainly governments, we know of the difficulties of selling this type of product, we believe that great partners with experience in high impact products can help us to create a good business model, focused mainly on governments.