About Crossroads School

At Crossroads School, we don’t have a standardized learning environment like most schools. Based in Longmont, CO, we’re an alternative school that serves middle and high school students who aren’t making it in traditional-based schools. Our school gives students another opportunity and a different avenue to succeed and make a significant impact on the world. With our individualized, mastery-based, highly-relational approach, we help students rebuild their skills and confidence, earn a diploma, and make a positive plan for their future.

Implementing Sycamore School

When we were searching for school management systems, one of our main priorities was finding a system that would organize our data and keep it in an easily-accessible format. As we continued our research, we looked for specific features, talked with references from other schools, and evaluated costs. Upon doing so, we determined that Sycamore School was a great balance of excellent customer service, had the features we needed at our school, and was a fair and reasonable price.

As we implemented Sycamore at Crossroads, we wanted a clean slate. Our goal was to start from the beginning with clean, organized data, which is an objective we achieved! We’ve been using Sycamore School since 2010, and we’ve greatly enjoyed working with their employees and the platform in improving our day-to-day operations in an efficient manner.

Administrative efficiency

Some of the most important tasks that have been streamlined and simplified have come from the administrative duties. We’re constantly needing access to data for grant applications, government forms, etc., and generating reports within Sycamore is incredibly straightforward. On a daily basis, we’re able to export reports into Excel and sort and organize the data as needed.

Being able to share these responsibilities is also a blessing. The administrative support staff enters and manages most of the day-to-day duties such as attendance, immunization records, weekly newsletters, text messages, etc. The access and variety to all these different features helps our administration out immensely and ensure the mandatory tasks get completed in a given school day.

Communication and collaboration

One of our favorite things about Sycamore has been the ability to enhance and disseminate communication. We’ve sent out a weekly newsletter in Sycamore for 13 ½ years now! For us, it’s a simple way to keep staff, parents, and volunteers informed and engaged about what’s happening at Crossroads. We also find the text messaging feature to be highly beneficial. The convenience of sending instantaneous messages about last-minute reminders, weekly newsletter links, school closures, etc., helps ensure we can get a message sent out quickly and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Our teachers have also vastly improved parent-teacher communication through Sycamore by sending daily behavior reports and weekly academic updates. This allows parents to be up-to-date on their students’ progress. Since we’re a non-traditional school and don’t have ordinary assignments and grades, we aren’t necessarily using the Progress Reports in the classroom as intended, but it’s been a fantastic feature for us. With the click of a button, our teachers can email Progress Reports to parents so they can see their students’ growth and progression on a routine basis.

Positive impact on student success

Most of our students come to us with failing grades and negative school experiences. Sycamore has helped our students get on the right track by sending those aforementioned behavior reports and academic progress updates. The product’s had a positive impact on the students because success is contagious. If the students see they have a great report, that’s going to motivate them to continue to do well and focus on their goals.

In fact, we have a recent success story that illustrates just that. We send home quarterly transcript and requirements summaries through Sycamore, and a new parent told me that she was reviewing her son’s first transcript from Crossroads that showed all A’s and B’s. Her son was so happy and proud of his accomplishments and hard work! Having an official transcript that showcased his excellent performance in earning A’s and B’s made all the difference in the world for him. That’s one of many ways how Sycamore can be used as a platform to positively reinforce academic success and performance in the classroom.

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