SchoolQuest was created by the Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC) to help parents of military-connected children manage the process of school transitions more effectively.
This SchoolQuest walkthrough demo illustrates the features and benefits of the most comprehensive tool available for managing individual school moves and academic career progress across multiple years.
SchoolQuest is a free, online tool that helps parents of military-connected children to prepare for the frequent school moves and other unique stressors of a military lifestyle that could adversely affect their academic success.
The website serves as a virtual hub where parents and students can find helpful information, tools, and resources centralized on a single platform.
SchoolQuest was created to support military families and students with the school transitions they face as the result of frequent military-related moves.
While the resources and features can be helpful for students of all ages, the majority of the functionality is focused on helping middle and high school students navigate through multiple moves throughout their academic careers.
This is a 100% free service developed by The Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC) and made possible by a generous grant from The USAA Foundation, Inc.
MCEC has been involved in multiple research studies that wanted to understand the adverse effects of repeated school moves on student performance and emotional well-being, including a study from The Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia University called “Mitigating the Impact of School Mobility,” that found that a smooth and efficient enrollment is very important in helping students transition to a new school.
Using this and other key research findings as a guide, the organization set out to compile in one location the tools, help and the resources that parents need to address the challenges their children face due to mobility related to the military lifestyle. And SchoolQuest was born.
A parent working group with members from multiple branches of the military service worked together with MCEC to create the initial SchoolQuest platform along with the following tools.
Keeping up with all of the details and requirements for a single school move is challenging enough, however when you move multiple times between the beginning of 6th grade through high school graduation, any number of factors can result in lost credit hours, enrollment delays or missed opportunities.
That's why we created SchoolQuest's academic tracker, to monitor and plan each student's academic career progress from 6th to 12th grade. Fully understanding the larger educational picture, helps parents see beyond the move at hand to make better long-term decisions for their students.
Even though the whole family is moving together, each student has different requirements, details and deadlines. With SchoolQuest, you can create a separate profile for each of your students so you can keep all of the necessary transition information associated with the correct child.
Over time, all of the notes, documents and details for each move stay associated with the proper student, so you can easily access materials from previous school transitions and moves.
There are so many details that need to be managed in order to ensure your student has a seamless transition between schools. That's why SchoolQuest's flexible checklists are one of the most popular features among our users.
We provide several out-of-the-box checklists for you to use covering common processes--ranging from school withdrawal to completing a college application--that you can customize for your particular case or student. There is also a custom checklist creator that empowers you to take control of any process. Every checklist can be associated with an individual student and can integrate with most popular online calendar applications, so you never miss a due date.
Keeping track of all the moving pieces during a PCS transition is a daunting task, and unfortunately there is little room for error. One missed deadline can result in your child not getting the class needed to graduate or a delay in when they can start at the new school.
Thankfully, SchoolQuest has an integrated reminders and notifications tool that makes sure to remind you in plenty of time to meet all of your school deadlines.
When you're moving to a new town that you're not familiar with, how do you know which schools are best for your students? SchoolQuest provides a search function for the GreatSchools, Niche and DoDEA websites. You can even take student-specific notes in SchoolQuest while you research the educational opportunities available in the next community where you PCS.
SchoolQuest includes a large collection of topic-specific websites, webinars, podcasts and other interactive resources that can provide you with helpful insights into the topic you are currently struggling with.