GA- Sole Source Letter (DeKalb County)

To whom it may concern,

The intent of this letter is to verify SchooLinks College and Career Readiness Platform (SchooLinks CCR
Platform) is a sole source product that is exclusively built, distributed, and supported by SchooLinks,
Inc.(SchooLinks). No other companies provide the same feature set and capabilities that SchooLinks
offers.

Georgia Work-Based Learning Data Reporting Alignment
SchooLinks Work-Based Learning management solution generates data that is fully aligned with the
official state definitions and requirements. SchooLinks automatically formats and pushes all required data
directly into the reporting portal in compliance with the state submission standards, hence increasing
reporting efficiency by eliminating manual reporting.

Comprehensive Georgia BRIDGE Law Compliance and Tracking
SchooLinks fully aligns with the Georgia BRIDGE Law by providing a comprehensive platform for tracking
and reporting all required activities for students in grades 6–12. The system enables districts to assign
BRIDGE Law activities to the correct grade and at the appropriate time of year, ensuring students are
always on track with compliance milestones. It digitizes and monitors tasks such as career interest and
aptitude assessments, exploration of career clusters, creation and revision of Individual Graduation Plans,
and acknowledgment of Georgia Dual Enrollment and workforce development initiatives. Integrated tools
like the “Find Your Path,” “Would You Rather,” and “Top Skills” assessments help students identify and
save careers of interest, plan courses, and set postsecondary goals, while real-time dashboards give
counselors a clear view of each student’s progress. This structured, time-bound approach not only
satisfies state reporting requirements but also keeps students actively engaged in meaningful career
exploration and academic planning throughout their middle and high school years.

Fully Guided Academic Planner with Real-time Error Checking
SchooLinks’ Academic Planner is a complete, self-guided experience for students to plan courses for their
academic careers. It provides the ability for students to plan throughout middle school and high school,
including for up to 7 years at a time. The platform leverages sophisticated graph-based algorithms to
traverse large tree-based structures of complex course, prereq, and co-req requirements simultaneously.
This allows SchooLinks to automatically check for errors and graduation eligibility with each change in
real-time that students make to their plans with an extremely low latency. SchooLinks is the only company
that offers this technology. Traditional course planner tools only support non-real-time,batch error
checking following plan submission.

Hollistic, Deeply Integrated Native Workflow & Tracking System for CCR

SchooLinks offers a comprehensive, deeply integrated native tracking system for College and Career
Readiness (CCR), enabling staff to monitor student progress through solution-specific dashboards. These
tracking capabilities include the Scope & Sequence framework for monitoring student activities, the
readiness indicators for state-mandated graduation requirements, a College Athletic Eligibility Tracking
(NCAA), the CTAE Program Dashboard for career, technical and agricultural education pathways, and
more.




                              info@schoolinks.com                   schoolinks.com                   Austin, TX
        The Scope & Sequence feature digitizes and streamlines task assignment and completion
        tracking, allowing districts to create customized plans for students across all grade levels. This
        centralized system eliminates the need for manual tracking and provides real-time insights into
        student progress, ensuring alignment with district and state requirements.The system provides
        automated logic to conditionally assign specific tasks to certain groups of students based on
        post-secondary goals

        The Readiness Indicator Dashboard is a configurable framework that instruments student
        progress toward state-mandated college and career readiness benchmarks. This feature aligns
        with each state's specific terminology and reporting requirements, ensuring compliance with
        legislative mandates. SchooLinks’ Readiness Dashboard combines data from multiple sources:
        activities completed directly in SchooLinks, data sources from within the district, and automatic
        ingestion of third party sources like assessment providers. The tool provides the ability for
        students to plan against the requirements and allows staff to see predicted outcomes based on
        historical statistical patterns. A layer of customizable “insights” can be configured specifically for
        the district to emphasize progress against specific subsets of requirements. The tool also
        surfaces "intervention segments," which are groups of students that are algorithmically identified
        as benefiting from specific actions that their supporting staff members could take.

        The College Athletic Eligibility Tracking (NCAA) provides a dashboard for each student,
        displaying their overall eligibility status for NCAA Division I, II, III, Junior College, and NAIA
        programs. It tracks NCAA D1 and D2 course completion and evaluates students’ potential for
        eligibility based on future planned courses. The tool also calculates the NCAA Core GPA based
        on approved courses, with an option to configure custom grading scales if approved by the
        NCAA. The tracker also suggests minimum grades needed to maintain eligibility and provides
        helpful links for each division. Students and counselors can generate a PDF summary of eligibility
        status or download a CSV on-track report showing requirement completion for multiple students.
        Unlike other tools that calculate eligibility from historical courses, we take a forward
        looking-approach ensuring students planned courses put them on track for meeting requirements.

        The CTAE (Career, Technical and Agricultural Education) Dashboard supports districts in
        tracking students' progress toward completing career-focused programs of study. SchooLinks
        tracks students taken and planned courses and industry-based credential attainment to determine
        their state program requirements. We can then recommend additional courses to be taken to
        ensure completion of the maximum amount of programs. This ensures students understand how
        their course plan choices impact their potential to meet state requirements. By centralizing CTAE
        data, SchooLinks enables districts to identify students who are on track or need additional
        support to achieve their career readiness goals.

By integrating these advanced tracking tools, SchooLinks empowers schools and districts with real-time
analytics, ensuring students stay on course for graduation and future success.

Swipeable Career Interest Inventory Assessment
SchooLinks is the only company in the market that offers a full suite of adaptive, swipeable career interest
inventory assessments. Compared to multiple-choice based questionnaires presented in traditional linear
form, this modern approach to delivery assessments has proven to be a highly effective driver of student



                               info@schoolinks.com                     schoolinks.com                     Austin, TX
engagement and reducing cognitive load. Students can interact with the content and questions in a more
visual manner and relate to the material as entertainment just as much as a learning experience.
SchooLinks is also the only platform to support localization of assessments by districts to allow
recommendations of their own unique career pathways and course offerings to help students prepare for
their academic planning.

True Work-based Learning Focused CCR Platform
SchooLinks provides a solution called the Program Management Suite, which allows districts to create
programs to connect students with opportunities - internships, jobs, apprenticeships, scholarships and
more. This is unique in the market because it is integrated directly into a college and career readiness
platform. Students' activities in the rest of the platform inform the application and placement process. This
highly configurable and customizable solution connects LEAs, SEAs, institutes of higher education,
non-profits, and for-profit companies to power high-impact programs for students/recent graduates. We
have two different program modes – “staff managed placement” where staff curate internship/work
opportunities and place students on behalf of employers and “student-sourced placement” where students
find their own jobs and internships and apply on behalf of their employers for formal recognition and
participation in the school-sponsored program (many times for credit award purposes). Once placements
are created, students, employers, staff members, and guardians can all have forms and sequences of
forms assigned. These forms are either completed digitally (like a Google Form or Survey Monkey) or
they are present in a PDF form that can be filled in the browser using an internal framework called eFil,
which functions similarly to DocuSign. These forms are directly integrated into the lifecycle of the program
and staff can track form completion program-wide. The Program Management tool includes an evaluation
framework where districts can configure and select learning standards and competency/skill taxonomies
for evaluations. Program Managers can assign students, staff, and employers evaluations throughout the
program process for compliance with state requirements and district standards. All of the engagement of
external partners is captured and logged automatically in our “Industry Partner Database,” a
purpose-built, deeply integrated CRM functionality in SchooLinks that allows districts to track community
engagement in their work-based learning programs. SchooLinks also generates the exact reports needed
for Perkins V reporting in many states across the nation and provides bulk exports to support state audits
of district work-based learning activities.



Experience Tracker Framework
SchooLinks' Experience Tracking framework is the central hub where students log a wide range of
activities, including internships, volunteer work, certifications, and job shadowing. This comprehensive
system allows administrators to set up as many different “experience type” configurations to scaffold the
recording process of hours, participation, formal credentials, or portfolio items. In the configuration
process, administrators can define different verification and approval processes (supervisors, even
without SchooLinks accounts verify through unique email links), custom questions (file uploads for
evidence, free response, multiple choice, and even webcam/video recording questions for student
reflection). Administrators can also set pre-defined allowable entries in the setup process, including
referencing states’ approved credential lists. The system aggregates entries and hours and helps
students chart their progress toward completion of requirements. The experiences, portfolio items, and
credentials that students and staff record are deeply integrated into the rest of the SchooLinks platform:




                              info@schoolinks.com                    schoolinks.com                    Austin, TX
entries automatically show in students’ resumes/profiles, credential wallets, and the accountability
tracking framework in SchooLinks.

Integrated Digital Credential Wallet
SchooLinks is the only college and career readiness platform with a standards-based Digital Credential
Wallet. District data and verified student achievements in other parts of the platform are automatically
issued as verified Open Badges 3.0 claims. The issuing process is designed to happen seamlessly
without operational overhead. SchooLinks also provides a framework for districts to create, define, and
issue their badges to recognize and gamify student learning and post-secondary preparedness. Students
can import badges from other standards-based credential wallets and training providers such as
Accredabe, LinkedIn Learning, and many others. The SchooLinks wallet handles verifying these
credentials from their sources and presenting them as verified to districts/staff who might need to use
these achievements to satisfy accountability requirements. Students can also export their achievements
from SchooLinks into other digital wallets. SchooLinks produces Comprehensive Learner Records (CLR V
2.0), which represent students' academic history and additional non-course related achievements in a
structured, portable and verifiable format.

Integrated Alumni Solution with Lifetime Access
SchooLinks offers a robust alumni solution that enables districts to maintain strong connections with
graduates through a comprehensive database, survey tools, and analytics. Districts can track alumni
post-secondary timelines, manage contact information, and access historical student data. The platform
supports standardized alumni surveys to meet reporting requirements for various educational programs.
With seamless integration into the National Student Clearinghouse, SchooLinks automates
post-secondary outcome tracking and provides valuable insights through analytics. Alumni retain lifetime
access to their accounts, ensuring continued use of resumes, portfolios, and other stored work while
allowing districts to monitor engagement and outcomes.

Auto-Completing Personalized Learning Plan (PLP)
SchooLinks' PLP solution streamlines the process of aligning students' career aspirations with their
educational paths. Unlike traditional PLP solutions that require manual data entry, SchooLinks
automatically pulls PLP elements from various student activities throughout the school year, reducing
redundancy and last-minute submissions. This allows students and counselors to focus on reviewing and
refining plans rather than data entry. The platform automates PLP generation by consolidating data from
student activities, manages the counselor approval workflow, collects guardian electronic signatures,
provides insights from aggregated PLP data, maintains version tracking for yearly updates, and allows for
printable PLP exports. Using SchooLinks, districts see higher PLP completion rates, and students find the
process more meaningful for their future planning.

Integrated Wellness Check-ins and Durable Skills Lessons
SchooLinks enhances students' employability with tools like Durable Skills Lessons, wellness check-ins,
self-assessments, and customizable surveys, all integrated into a real-time data dashboard. All curriculum
aligns with CASEL standards and supports PBIS and Restorative Practices. Districts can customize SEL
terminology to reflect their unique needs, changing the term within the platform to fit their community (e.g.
Durable Skills, PowerSkills, etc.) The Check-ins module enables staff to track student well-being through
quick assessments covering emotional, physical, social, and cognitive areas. Schools can use preset or




                              info@schoolinks.com                    schoolinks.com                    Austin, TX
custom questions, set check-in frequency, and assign them based on student groups. Word alerts ensure
districts can celebrate positive check-ins and intervene in case of any negative keywords. Check-In
Insights helps staff analyze responses, monitor alert words, and provide timely support and resources to
students in need.



For further information, please do not hesitate to contact me at katie@schoolinks.com.



Best,
Katie Fang
CEO, SchooLinks, Inc.




                             info@schoolinks.com                   schoolinks.com                  Austin, TX