Executive Summary
In 2015, San Antonio-area Comal Independent School District launched Comal U, a new multi-day PD institute providing summer learning hours for each of the district’s 1,300 teachers. KickUp worked with Comal to build out a custom event management and credit tracking system aligning with both state policy requirements and Comal’s own curriculum. With the time saved seamlessly managing, tracking and coordinating a high-volume event series, Comal U added 15 more sessions the very first year — and counting.
About Comal Independent School District
Comal ISD is a fast-growing Central Texas district serving over 24,000 students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. With an average of 1000 new students and 300 new teachers — many of them brand-new to the profession — per year, the district’s teaching staff needed to be laser-focused on continuous improvement. In 2015, Comal decided to take their existing year-round PD cycle one step further by hosting a summer institute that aligned with Comal educators’ needs and goals. That event became the yearly Comal U, two summer mini-conferences packed with over 200 sessions across grade levels, subjects and learning domains.
The Challenges
Comal U’s personalized educator learning experience was popular and effective, but the added complexity meant more work for the district team. Staff spent hours a week on coordination alone: managing signups, taking phone calls, tracking state PD requirements, and combing through inboxes to chase down attendee data. A hybrid of two traditional event management systems was enough at first, but by 2018 the team knew they needed a central hub for educators, coaches and administrators.
Comal began to search for a new platform with three primary goals in mind:
- Creating a single RSVP and tracking system for Comal U’s events
- Customizing and tracking credit hour requirements
- Cutting down on the amount of time staff spent handling the moving parts