Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, if your school district is experiencing technology budget pressure or would like to improve its return on investment in technology purchases. If your current software is lacking in functionality or is costly to maintain and support, we can help. If you would like to spend less on administrative systems and focus more of your resources on the classroom and your students, we can help. If you have to reduce your IT budget without impacting your teachers and students, we can help.

We are dedicated to helping school districts improve the return on their technology spending and help drive down the costs of K-12 solutions. As a not-for-profit organization, we do accept donations to help fund our development efforts. It is also possible to donate toward membership benefits for an individual school district. If you would like to help your local district, contact us at donate@schoolomatic.com.

We do not think taxpayer-funded public schools should have to pay millions of dollars to commercial software vendors to take attendance or administer quizzes or report progress. A number of wonderful and free open source solutions like Moodle, Drupal, and Google Classroom are being adopted by resourceful school technology departments. While these offerings are a nice option, they are limited and require substantial effort to deploy. Our goal is to provide commercial quality solutions, including full source code, on an affordable yearly membership basis that includes consulting hours and/or training to support implementation efforts for successful adoption.

All our solutions are designed to be as inexpensive to run and support as possible, utilizing open source platforms, servers, and databases, so additional licenses are not required. Solutions can be run on Linux or Windows and can use MySQL 8.0 or higher or Microsoft SQL Server if existing enterprise agreements make that attractive. They can be deployed on premises, with a cloud vendor, or even in a hybrid arrangement with APIs to integrate to other solutions.

Our member solutions are licensed to an individual member district on an annual basis. For a $5,000 Solutions Membership, districts can use any of the products in our portfolio, all designed to work seamlessly together from our SchoolOmatic portal, which provides a platform for parents, teachers, students, and administrators to communicate and share information. Each membership includes a single point of contact at a district. A nominal $300 charge applies per additional login accounts for each additional staff member, but the benefits for the district remain the same. All Solutions members have access to our Technology Exchange for valuable insider articles, item bank exchange, member forums for exchanging advice, etc. There is no limit to the number of subdomains deployed by the district running under the district domain.

Is manual data transformation required to move critical information from one system to another, or do custom APIs need to be developed? Are software releases time and resource consuming? Are releases dependent on infrastructure changes or upgrades? So many factors contribute to the total cost of ownership for enterprise software, especially in the K-12 environment. Our goal is to help make these solutions as simple and as automated as possible, so there is little involvement required to implement, support or maintain. You should not have to pay thousands of dollars to test and debug commercial vendors' solutions, only to have to repeat the process again next year. There is a better way.

Absolutely. If you have perpetual licenses for software that you no longer use, or have additional data center capacity since moving solutions to the cloud, we can help you commercialize these assets, which in turn will help provide resources to your district for classroom technology such as tablets, notebooks or projectors. Our Exchange provides a confidential forum for districts to offer their own intellectual property such as test items or curriculum to other districts or to barter for other software or material. You may be sitting on millions in untapped value that your taxpayers and administration would be happy to see used for the good of the district. Call us to find out how we can help.

If you cannot name every single person who has access to your student data, then your data is not secure. We have seen software with 20-30 vendor staff accounts with full read/write access to data. Cloud platforms could have administrators in any part of the globe. Can you see the data behind your solutions in the database so you can query and extract data as you wish? These should all be considerations for your technology portfolio. We can help you make sure only the right people have access to this confidential data, with audit trails and/or alerts to any variance from your security policies.

If you would be interested in contributing your experience as an Advisory Board Member or know of other companies or firms you would like to see us partner with, please let us know via email: richard.steere@schoolomatic.com.

We have been around since 2016. Keeping to a small firm that stays dedicated to helping schools save money on their technology budgets, we intend to keep our costs low and stay independent in order to best serve our members. Revenue from consulting services and donations go toward the development and enhancement of our software solutions. We will also consider sponsorships from companies doing business in this sector, if we feel they provide affordable value to PK-20 institutions.