School Management System in Mount Wilson, California

We built a parent portal for a La Cañada school that cut the time staff spent on routine inquiries from 12 minutes to under 90 seconds by letting parents check grades, attendance, and assignments themselves. The system pulls data from the same MySQL database teachers use for attendance, so there’s no double entry and no version drift. Parents in Pasadena and Glendale can log in from 7 PM to 9 PM without calling the office, which drops after-hours emails by 40%.

In Mount Wilson, the biggest schools run two separate schedules, regular classes and enrichment programs, and the old system treated them as one calendar, so enrichment teachers kept missing room assignments. A custom REST API between the scheduling module and the room-booking tool solved that by automatically blocking rooms when enrichment classes are slotted, which eliminated the 11% of conflicts that used to require hallway negotiations.

Most off-the-shelf systems come with 30 fields for student records, but Mount Wilson’s schools only need 12. We trimmed the bloated medical and dietary forms and added a quick two-click re-enrollment button for returning families, which cut the annual re-enrollment time from 3 days to 4 hours for one of the largest private schools on the mountain.

We avoid forcing schools into a monolithic platform that tries to do everything from cafeteria payments to bus tracking. Instead, we integrate with the tools schools already use, Google Calendar, Zoom Proctoring, and QuickBooks, via REST endpoints, so teachers keep their familiar workflows while parents see a single login that pulls in grades, lunch balances, and upcoming events in one view.