September 11, 2024 • 11 mins
The more information you have, the better your decision-making can be. That idea is the crux of the solution that Zach Vander Veen created, a software and support program for school administrators, teachers and students he calls Abre, spanish for open. It is like no other program, integrating all the factors and information concerning students in one location, and available on an app. It came out of frustration with having so many different platforms one had to use to gather all the information needed for a successful school year. This program was created in the Tri-State and is being used by many local schools, which find it helpful, affordable, and an easy way to keep all a students pertinent information, grades, scores, lifestyle information and more, all in one easy to use platform.
Click here to see the Abre platform.
Click here to see the Abre platform.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This week on iHeart Sinsey, It's a hard.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Job being a teacher. It's a hard job being a parent.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
I'm Sandy Collins and today I'll be speaking with the
former Cincinnati teacher who saw a need and now heads
up a company that he founded to solve the problem.
Zach Vanderven worked as the director of Tech at the
Hamilton City School District, taught history at Oak Hills, and
then took his passion for learning and founded Aubrey. They
say it's a one stop shop for data around social
(00:29):
emotional well being, enrollment, attendance, intervention, academic performance and more
for students. It's a software program they've created that gives
educators a place to find all of the relevant information
about a student so they can individualize their education and
better prepare them for their careers. Now on iHeart Sinsey
with Sandy Collins, Welcome to iHeart Sincy. My first guest
(00:51):
is Zach Vanderven. He is now the co founder of Aubrey.
It's a platform, a software platform that combines all all
of the information about students in schools so that the teachers,
the educators, the students can find everything that they need,
all in one location. Let's learn more about that. Zach,
welcome to the show. You're a teacher turned entrepreneur, and
(01:14):
you worked in the Hamilton City School District and Oak
Hill Schools and you saw a need when it comes
to helping students, you know, succeed and helping parents figure
things out, help teachers. So tell me about your experience
as a teacher here in the tri State and how
you saw that need and how you came to where
you are. Now that's a big question, so take it away.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
No, it's great.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Yeah, I know, I loved I loved teaching basically agent
you know, I started Okills is where I where I
really was teaching social studies. I think, look with the
big amount of chromebooks and other software solutions that really
hit the scene in the late thoughts, you know, and
just a lot of tools that were put out there
(01:59):
for schools to use. They helped in certain ways, but
they created a pretty big problem in the sense of
that were siloed. And what does that mean, Like you'd
have to go to this one program over here to
do your grades, and you have to go to one
program over here to do a class assignment, and one
program here to do payments. And registration, and it's just not
(02:21):
a good experience, Like it just was very disjointed. Not
to mention frankly, it cost a lot of money because
those are different pos and purchase orders that you're putting
out for every different company that you're actually buying product from.
So I could sit back as a teacher and understand
the need for addressing that, and then I actually kind
(02:43):
of started working my way up the ladder, became an administrator.
By becoming the tech director at Hamilton, was able to
actually get my hand on some investment money, some funny
to actually put towards solving this problem. And at first
I was looking around like is there a product that
does everything I wanted to do?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Didn't find it wasn't there.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
So it was really great. The Hamilton City School District
board at the time was.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Like, what do you want to do? I was like,
I have this idea.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
There's this really talented individual, Chris Rose, my co founder,
in the classroom. I think he should come out and
he knows what he's doing, and we want to build it.
We want to roll our own solve the problems we're
facing with all these different programs in different silos, bringing
all the data into one spot, so we can actually
start to synthesize that data to really understand how to
help kids and you know, save money.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So we did the board was cool. They were like, yeah,
give it a shot.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Don't usually see that in school boards, but that one
was just like, give it a shot.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
We did it.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Three years later, we're saving in the district close to
a half a million dollars a year. All the districts
around us are like, hey, we would kind of like
to have that, And we were faced with the question
of what do we do, Like we if we want
to grow, we have to step out of school district
and become entrepreneurs and that's when we started Opera So
and it's been a wild journey since then.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Learn it's entrepreneurship is very different than K twelve education.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I would imagine half a million dollars is a lot
of savings in a year. And you said, I saw
that you had a lot of local school districts that
are also using this Aubre platform. First of all, for
those that don't speak Spanish, tell us about the name.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, So Aubrey means open in Spanish. And the reason
it has that is.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Because we're opening up all the different silos and connecting
different software solutions to come together to really give us
the data we need to help kids. We're also opening
up the community. There's a sort of an unofficial motto
of like we are the village, all right, So we
can connect students to not just teachers and staff members
and to parents, but we can also bring in things
(04:45):
like Cincinnati Children's Hospital or the YMCA, or work based
learning partners who are offering internships and apprenticeships. We really
do connect everyone to the student to help them grow.
So Aubre meaning open, was just a really appropriate name.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
It's kind of a fun fact. It starts with an A.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
The second letter is a B, so whenever we're like
visiting places, we're always first on the list. It's just
we didn't do that intentionally, but it was also very
a nice, nice outcome.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Good perk. Good perk for sure. So you guys consider
yourselves like a one stop shop for data combining information
about the whole student. And we're talking about their attendance,
we're talking about their behavior, we're talking about there maybe
would social economic areas being there. It's all in there.
So when you look at a student, what other things
(05:32):
do you connect in this platform so that a teacher
and educator and administrator can look at a student and
get the whole picture pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, So really it's everything, and this is sort of
the holy grail that we were after. Everybody thinks of
grades and behavior right or test scores like yeah, and
those are important, very important. So it can be things
where students are doing surveys and they're evaluating like you know,
how you doing today, Are you tired?
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Are you happy?
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Those are like key factors that you need surveys to
kiddos to understand how their feeling as they're going through
their day. We'll bring in portfolios where kids can actually
flourish and like create these wonderful portfolios of growth that
they do between kindergarten and twelfth grade. It's called Passport
for Tomorrow. This really good program with Middletown where we
developed it where kindergarteners go through kindergarten and they contribute
(06:22):
portfolio objects all the way up to twelfth grade and
you can see that growth over time. We offer job opportunities.
It's really hard to like say like when we say data,
well what type of data? It's all the data, even
to the point where like we're getting very involved with
fiscal data.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Let me give you an example really quickly.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
So one of the key things that superintendents are super
concerned about right now is chronic absenteeism. And they're concerned
about it for a host of reasons. Right you need
kids in their seats to learn so they can experience
a very wonderful future. They're also concerned because if kids
aren't in their seats in some states, you don't get paid,
like if they're absent the state, like they're deduct money.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
So we're able to take that to roll.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
It together and create dashboards for superintendents to start getting
predictive analytics of what's trending with their kids showing or
not showing. Even associate the cost of kids not coming
to school that day as a running number daily in
real time.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
That's incredibly valuable. I mean, that's just one example.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
We've got hundreds of different examples, and we're always discovering
new ones depending on the needs of K twelve education.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
You're customizing these programs for school systems.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yes, that's part of our secret sauce they actually come
to us, they describe their problems and we actually build
it accordingly for them. Probably not a surprise to know
that if you're doing an early morning system with students,
that's going to look different in Winton Woods versus Wyoming
school district, right, depending on your makeup of your kiddos,
(07:48):
your board policies, all those different components, So you can't
just do a one size fits all.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
You definitely have to adjust accordingly.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
You have an app for students, What does that? What
do they get to play with?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
What can they do in it? Yeah, it's all can
like the top things that they do with it.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
So one is it's very much a method for communication,
so teachers or principals or even the superintendent communicate directly
to kids through kind of our announcement features that we have.
I think the big way that kids use it is
we have something called the student through sixty and that
student three sixty is and they can see their own
if the school district allows them to pull it up,
and they can see everything in it, so they can
(08:26):
see their class schedule, their portfolios, any attachments or files
that are following them through their K twelve career, their
state assessments, act grades, behavior education. It's all right there,
which for them it's always hard to find because again,
so many different places and it's not very transparent.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
With us, it's incredibly transparent. I would say the biggest.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Powerful thing that we hear from students two things that
they really love. The first thing is that they love
that student three sixty and being able to see the
whole picture of their growth over time.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The second thing they really love. They really love this
thing called a wellness check in.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Once a week, it pops up on their chrome book
or on their phone just says how you doing, how's
it going, and they can put feedback in and it
routes to an appropriate adult and all that kind of stuff.
We do surveys of our user base, and students in
particular come back and say.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
This is amazing. Every single school district should be using this.
We love it.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
It's important that this happened in schools. So sorry, I'm
ramming a little bit, even tell it's something like it's
my baby, So like, I'm really proud of what we're
doing because we're having a really positive impact on kids.
And when you hear kids come back to you, students
come back to you and say, this is really awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Pulls on the heart.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
What do you want people to take away from our
conversation today.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
If you're looking to have a really good platform with
solid data to help kids grow, then you should be
thinking about OBRE because we are one of the few
platforms that is able to integrate and obtain all the
data surrounding a student, and that can have a big
impact on the growth trajectory of students. But the other
thing I'd really want to say, because this is really
what it comes down to in my opinion, as a parent,
(09:59):
as a teacher, as an administrator, even as a partner man.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
We make the job easier.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
We increase operational efficiency as one of our our value propositions.
But it's the one I'm really really proud about. It's
a hard job being a teacher. It's a hard job
being a parent, you know, And you know you can come
home on a Thursday night and you're trying to find
your kids' grades over here in some field trip form
over here, and Bobby blah over here, Like it's it's
just so frustrating to make it so that you can
(10:26):
just go to one spot find it. It's right there,
It's super clean, super clear. It's just a delightful experience,
and we, like, you know, technology should be making people's
lives easier, not hard. So that's really kind of my
personal champion favorite.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But yeah, how do folks get a hold of Aubrey?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, thanks, Sandy. I would say the best way to
do it is just visit our website.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
It's a b R E dot com, Aubrey dot com,
and they can find out all the cool.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Things that we do there, including how to get in
touch with us.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Well, it sounds like a great program. Thank you for
putting it together, Thanks for being a teacher. I'd say
thank you for your service, as we like to say,
because teachers do change lives every day with every student
that they touch. And thank you so much, Zach.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
I really appreciate it. All right, take care now,
This week on iHeart Sinsey, It's a hard.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Job being a teacher. It's a hard job being a parent.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
I'm Sandy Collins and today I'll be speaking with the
former Cincinnati teacher who saw a need and now heads
up a company that he founded to solve the problem.
Zach Vanderven worked as the director of Tech at the
Hamilton City School District, taught history at Oak Hills, and
then took his passion for learning and founded Aubrey. They
say it's a one stop shop for data around social
(00:29):
emotional well being, enrollment, attendance, intervention, academic performance and more
for students. It's a software program they've created that gives
educators a place to find all of the relevant information
about a student so they can individualize their education and
better prepare them for their careers. Now on iHeart Sinsey
with Sandy Collins, Welcome to iHeart Sincy. My first guest
(00:51):
is Zach Vanderven. He is now the co founder of Aubrey.
It's a platform, a software platform that combines all all
of the information about students in schools so that the teachers,
the educators, the students can find everything that they need,
all in one location. Let's learn more about that. Zach,
welcome to the show. You're a teacher turned entrepreneur, and
(01:14):
you worked in the Hamilton City School District and Oak
Hill Schools and you saw a need when it comes
to helping students, you know, succeed and helping parents figure
things out, help teachers. So tell me about your experience
as a teacher here in the tri State and how
you saw that need and how you came to where
you are. Now that's a big question, so take it away.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
No, it's great.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Yeah, I know, I loved I loved teaching basically agent
you know, I started Okills is where I where I
really was teaching social studies. I think, look with the
big amount of chromebooks and other software solutions that really
hit the scene in the late thoughts, you know, and
just a lot of tools that were put out there
(01:59):
for schools to use. They helped in certain ways, but
they created a pretty big problem in the sense of
that were siloed. And what does that mean, Like you'd
have to go to this one program over here to
do your grades, and you have to go to one
program over here to do a class assignment, and one
program here to do payments. And registration, and it's just not
(02:21):
a good experience, Like it just was very disjointed. Not
to mention frankly, it cost a lot of money because
those are different pos and purchase orders that you're putting
out for every different company that you're actually buying product from.
So I could sit back as a teacher and understand
the need for addressing that, and then I actually kind
(02:43):
of started working my way up the ladder, became an administrator.
By becoming the tech director at Hamilton, was able to
actually get my hand on some investment money, some funny
to actually put towards solving this problem. And at first
I was looking around like is there a product that
does everything I wanted to do?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Didn't find it wasn't there.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
So it was really great. The Hamilton City School District
board at the time was.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Like, what do you want to do? I was like,
I have this idea.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
There's this really talented individual, Chris Rose, my co founder,
in the classroom. I think he should come out and
he knows what he's doing, and we want to build it.
We want to roll our own solve the problems we're
facing with all these different programs in different silos, bringing
all the data into one spot, so we can actually
start to synthesize that data to really understand how to
help kids and you know, save money.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So we did the board was cool. They were like, yeah,
give it a shot.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Don't usually see that in school boards, but that one
was just like, give it a shot.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
We did it.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Three years later, we're saving in the district close to
a half a million dollars a year. All the districts
around us are like, hey, we would kind of like
to have that, And we were faced with the question
of what do we do, Like we if we want
to grow, we have to step out of school district
and become entrepreneurs and that's when we started Opera So
and it's been a wild journey since then.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Learn it's entrepreneurship is very different than K twelve education.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I would imagine half a million dollars is a lot
of savings in a year. And you said, I saw
that you had a lot of local school districts that
are also using this Aubre platform. First of all, for
those that don't speak Spanish, tell us about the name.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, So Aubrey means open in Spanish. And the reason
it has that is.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Because we're opening up all the different silos and connecting
different software solutions to come together to really give us
the data we need to help kids. We're also opening
up the community. There's a sort of an unofficial motto
of like we are the village, all right, So we
can connect students to not just teachers and staff members
and to parents, but we can also bring in things
(04:45):
like Cincinnati Children's Hospital or the YMCA, or work based
learning partners who are offering internships and apprenticeships. We really
do connect everyone to the student to help them grow.
So Aubre meaning open, was just a really appropriate name.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
It's kind of a fun fact. It starts with an A.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
The second letter is a B, so whenever we're like
visiting places, we're always first on the list. It's just
we didn't do that intentionally, but it was also very
a nice, nice outcome.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Good perk. Good perk for sure. So you guys consider
yourselves like a one stop shop for data combining information
about the whole student. And we're talking about their attendance,
we're talking about their behavior, we're talking about there maybe
would social economic areas being there. It's all in there.
So when you look at a student, what other things
(05:32):
do you connect in this platform so that a teacher
and educator and administrator can look at a student and
get the whole picture pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, So really it's everything, and this is sort of
the holy grail that we were after. Everybody thinks of
grades and behavior right or test scores like yeah, and
those are important, very important. So it can be things
where students are doing surveys and they're evaluating like you know,
how you doing today, Are you tired?
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Are you happy?
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Those are like key factors that you need surveys to
kiddos to understand how their feeling as they're going through
their day. We'll bring in portfolios where kids can actually
flourish and like create these wonderful portfolios of growth that
they do between kindergarten and twelfth grade. It's called Passport
for Tomorrow. This really good program with Middletown where we
developed it where kindergarteners go through kindergarten and they contribute
(06:22):
portfolio objects all the way up to twelfth grade and
you can see that growth over time. We offer job opportunities.
It's really hard to like say like when we say data,
well what type of data? It's all the data, even
to the point where like we're getting very involved with
fiscal data.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Let me give you an example really quickly.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
So one of the key things that superintendents are super
concerned about right now is chronic absenteeism. And they're concerned
about it for a host of reasons. Right you need
kids in their seats to learn so they can experience
a very wonderful future. They're also concerned because if kids
aren't in their seats in some states, you don't get paid,
like if they're absent the state, like they're deduct money.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
So we're able to take that to roll.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
It together and create dashboards for superintendents to start getting
predictive analytics of what's trending with their kids showing or
not showing. Even associate the cost of kids not coming
to school that day as a running number daily in
real time.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
That's incredibly valuable. I mean, that's just one example.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
We've got hundreds of different examples, and we're always discovering
new ones depending on the needs of K twelve education.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
You're customizing these programs for school systems.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yes, that's part of our secret sauce they actually come
to us, they describe their problems and we actually build
it accordingly for them. Probably not a surprise to know
that if you're doing an early morning system with students,
that's going to look different in Winton Woods versus Wyoming
school district, right, depending on your makeup of your kiddos,
(07:48):
your board policies, all those different components, So you can't
just do a one size fits all.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
You definitely have to adjust accordingly.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
You have an app for students, What does that? What
do they get to play with?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
What can they do in it? Yeah, it's all can
like the top things that they do with it.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
So one is it's very much a method for communication,
so teachers or principals or even the superintendent communicate directly
to kids through kind of our announcement features that we have.
I think the big way that kids use it is
we have something called the student through sixty and that
student three sixty is and they can see their own
if the school district allows them to pull it up,
and they can see everything in it, so they can
(08:26):
see their class schedule, their portfolios, any attachments or files
that are following them through their K twelve career, their
state assessments, act grades, behavior education. It's all right there,
which for them it's always hard to find because again,
so many different places and it's not very transparent.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
With us, it's incredibly transparent. I would say the biggest.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Powerful thing that we hear from students two things that
they really love. The first thing is that they love
that student three sixty and being able to see the
whole picture of their growth over time.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The second thing they really love. They really love this
thing called a wellness check in.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Once a week, it pops up on their chrome book
or on their phone just says how you doing, how's
it going, and they can put feedback in and it
routes to an appropriate adult and all that kind of stuff.
We do surveys of our user base, and students in
particular come back and say.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
This is amazing. Every single school district should be using this.
We love it.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
It's important that this happened in schools. So sorry, I'm
ramming a little bit, even tell it's something like it's
my baby, So like, I'm really proud of what we're
doing because we're having a really positive impact on kids.
And when you hear kids come back to you, students
come back to you and say, this is really awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Pulls on the heart.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
What do you want people to take away from our
conversation today.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
If you're looking to have a really good platform with
solid data to help kids grow, then you should be
thinking about OBRE because we are one of the few
platforms that is able to integrate and obtain all the
data surrounding a student, and that can have a big
impact on the growth trajectory of students. But the other
thing I'd really want to say, because this is really
what it comes down to in my opinion, as a parent,
(09:59):
as a teacher, as an administrator, even as a partner man.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
We make the job easier.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
We increase operational efficiency as one of our our value propositions.
But it's the one I'm really really proud about. It's
a hard job being a teacher. It's a hard job
being a parent, you know, And you know you can come
home on a Thursday night and you're trying to find
your kids' grades over here in some field trip form
over here, and Bobby blah over here, Like it's it's
just so frustrating to make it so that you can
(10:26):
just go to one spot find it. It's right there,
It's super clean, super clear. It's just a delightful experience,
and we, like, you know, technology should be making people's
lives easier, not hard. So that's really kind of my
personal champion favorite.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But yeah, how do folks get a hold of Aubrey?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, thanks, Sandy. I would say the best way to
do it is just visit our website.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
It's a b R E dot com, Aubrey dot com,
and they can find out all the cool.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Things that we do there, including how to get in
touch with us.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Well, it sounds like a great program. Thank you for
putting it together, Thanks for being a teacher. I'd say
thank you for your service, as we like to say,
because teachers do change lives every day with every student
that they touch. And thank you so much, Zach.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
I really appreciate it. All right, take care now,
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