Twin Rivers Unified School District

Struggling with a Professional Learning Management System (PLMS) from a large company that wasn’t keeping up with the district’s needs, California’s eighth-largest school district was bogged down with payroll inefficiencies and teacher disengagement. In just one year, KickUp helped transform operations — cutting payroll processing from weeks to hours, vastly improving user experience, and boosting teacher attendance across the district.

Above: Hear Jamie discuss her KickUp launch experience

The Challenge

The district’s then-current system was unreliable, lacked key functionality, and required a lot of manual intervention. For example, many professional learning events are offered in a series, starting in September and finishing in May. But the system would only send calendar invites for the first event date, so participants wouldn't know to show up for the rest of their sessions.

Program Development Specialist Jamie Manalo came to Twin Rivers’ professional development role in 2018, charged with managing PD for all 1,800 teachers and 4,000 staff at the district. 

Like many California school districts, Twin Rivers has a unique set of needs when it comes to professional learning compensation. Teachers can choose to receive hourly payment for any training attended over the summer, or they can request to have their hours credited toward an increased salary scale.

Initially, Twin Rivers handled these requests through individual emails and manual data input — an inefficient system that led to inaccuracies and wasted time. “It would take me days, weeks to do payroll,” Jamie says. “Out of an eight-hour day, I probably spent six hours in there just fixing things or trying to figure out who attended what.”

Most importantly, teachers couldn’t access the professional learning they needed. Attendance was poor due to logistical system issues. For example, “If you didn’t type in the exact title of a session word-for-word, it wouldn’t come up. So people would tell us, ‘I tried to sign up for trauma-informed training, but you don’t offer that,’ after I just scheduled seven of them.”

The Launch

“KickUp was probably the easiest software implementation I’ve ever done,” says Jamie. “As an IT person, I've done a lot of implementations and organization-level changes, and I can't say they've all gone well. This one was flawless.”

Twin Rivers personnel across the district also enjoyed the smooth transition. They credit the ease to a few factors:

• KickUp handled the heavy lifting of mapping their implementation back from a a target start date 
• Rolling the new system out as a summer pilot before wider launch in the fall
• Building solid initial foundations for data structure, tags, and event information

“The day we launched I was expecting for my phone and my email to explode — but it was so quiet,” says Jamie. “I stayed up until midnight watching the registration numbers roll up, because our teachers could use it right out the box.”

The Results

KickUp has dramatically improved efficiency, visibility, and engagement for Twin Rivers’ professional learning. In less than a year, the department has:

• Dramatically reduced manual work and time spent managing PD
• Cut payroll processing time from weeks to hours
• Increased staff’s visibility into their completed PD and compensation options
• Enabled self-service for teachers instead of going through administration
• Reinforced district strategy by grouping PD into strategic focus areas

Twin Rivers hosted 440 PD sessions between May 1 and August 1 this year. Previously, logging compensation options and coordinating with payroll was a heavy lift. But with KickUp, “I finished my payroll the fastest I've ever finished in the history of summer PD,” says Jamie.

Teachers are also engaging with professional learning offerings like never before. “Before, people just weren’t getting the training they needed because the system was so hard to use,” says Jamie. “KickUp is so much easier. I can find things. I understand how it works. And [teachers] are taking more PD now because they can log in and see it's right there.”

And Jamie feels the benefits too. “It's just freed up so much time for me. KickUp has saved me probably 75% of the time I used to spend on PD management, and I’m able to focus on other things now that I'm not stressing about the system.”

Above: TWUSD staff's reaction, in Jamie's own words

The Future

What’s next? Expanding the program to support new-to-the-classroom teachers during their critical first years of practice. Like districts across the country, Twin Rivers is making new teacher induction a priority to grow their talent pipeline.

“I work very closely with our new teacher support team to make sure they have skills and the tools that they need to be successful in the classroom. It’s really empowering for them to know where they need to be, what they're going to be learning and what to expect,” says Jamie. “I just feel like KickUp gives people ownership of their learning, and I love that.”