Keeping schools in the ‘Loop’: Local company expands operations tenfold
In the last 12 months, Luke Wiseman has onboarded new school diistricts, hired new employees, and expanded outreach for his start-up 'Loop.'
It has been about a year since we checked in with Luke Wiseman and his start-up, Loop. The business was founded to provide valuable communications and analytics data to keep school districts better connected.
As previously reported in teknovation.biz, the Loop was incorporated in 2021 by three founders, who all had teachers as parents. The founders, Wiseman, Riley Doty, and Jackson Walker all noticed a significant delay in school systems when it comes to implementing new technologies. They place the blame on the tight budgets school districts are given on a year-to-year basis. Plus, many other issues in educational systems that are more prominent and pressing to address.
The team at Loop wants to help schools make that transition as seamless, simple, and cost-efficient as possible by serving school districts in three main capacities: communication, analytics, and reporting.
The communication aspect helps schools implement an automated alert system to communicate with parents.
“Snow days are a good example,” Wiseman said. “Using Loop, schools can easily access all parents and guardians via. text message.”
The mass communication feature also automatically sorts the students by groups – so if the school wanted to send a reminder to parents of the 5th-grade class about a field trip day, they could do that.
The analytics portion of the software helps schools stay up to date on what’s going on with individual students in a large school system. Wiseman said this feature is especially useful in academic settings where the students have classes with different teachers throughout the day.
“If a student is getting a bad grade in math, oftentimes that teacher doesn’t know how the student is doing in other subjects. The analytics software shows students’ performance across all sectors of the school – missing assignments, absences, and test scores to help the counseling staff and school leadership better identify which students may be at risk of falling behind,” Wiseman explained.
Finally, the software’s reporting feature is particularly helpful. It keeps parents in the loop on what’s going on with their students’ performance. Schools no longer have to rely on sending home a physical notification slip for parents; instead, parents are notified digitally.
According to our interview with Wiseman last year, he said Loop’s automation reporting reduced infractions by 22 percent.
So, what has the company been up to in the last 12 months?
“Not much, just growing like crazy,” he said. It’s a very humble way of saying that the business has grown tenfold. The Loop now has 40 customers in six states, and two countries (U.S. and Canada). The school districts range from 900 to 138,000 students.
When we spoke to Wiseman last year, he had just completed some free pilot program testing and landed Anderson County Schools (~6,000 students) as a client. Truly, a lot has changed.
Additionally, the Loop team has expanded. The three founders hired two engineers and a couple of interns from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). Loop has also connected with some prominent industry partners and mentors.
Wiseman said it all panned out for the best, but not without some difficult moments.
“When you’re in school, it’s all about planning to start a business,” Wiseman said. “But, from first-hand experience, planning only gets you so far. You just have to ‘do the thing’ and continually adjust the plan.”
That included finding new ways to pitch the idea to school districts and maintaining open-mindedness when it came to adjusting the product.
“We came to realize that school districts may have some money allocated to communications – but few had money in the budget for analytics. By turning our product into a combo of both communications and analytics, it has allowed our product to fall under their communications funding umbrella,” he said.
Also, along the way, he’s made fixes to the software to better fit the needs of the districts they serve.
Wiseman believes it is his team’s dedication that has found them so much success with the platform. He is excited to continue growing, expanding, and servicing more school districts across the U.S.
Read more about the Loop on the website.
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