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The hidden cost of building workarounds you shouldn't need
One Illinois district was spending 45+ hours of administrator time per institute day managing professional development in Frontline. Not planning better PD. Not coaching teachers. Just fighting the platform—manual reconciliation, attendance workarounds, payroll exports that required re-entry when something didn't match.
After switching to KickUp, that dropped to under 5 hours. Same district. Same number of teachers. Same institute days. The difference: a platform that automated the work Frontline required them to do manually. That's 135+ hours of administrative capacity returned annually.
After every Frontline observation, evaluators face the same tedious process: go back through observation notes line by line. Manually tag each comment to a framework standard. Repeat for every observation, every teacher, every cycle. That work compounds: 20 observations per cycle, up to an hour of tagging and organizing notes, repeated across multiple evaluators. KickUp's AI organizes and tags everything to your framework in real time, so evaluators walk out of a classroom with the observation already done.
Frontline's PD module creates similar friction. The registration experience is clunky enough that staff disengage before they even show up — and the administrative burden of reconciling attendance and payroll falls back on whoever's running the program. In KickUp, teachers register, confirm attendance, and track their own credits without touching the admin team. At Twin Rivers, the administrator managing PD for 1,800 teachers went from spending six hours a day on attendance and payroll to cutting that time by 75%.
Principals describe observation notes disappearing mid-workflow. One Wisconsin principal told us she'd been "very diligent" about her process ever since losing an entire observation in her first year—carefully tracking which tabs were open, double-checking that everything saved before moving to the next step.
"If I had two things open, I successfully lost my notes... I've been very diligent since, but it's hard when you're doing all the notes."
Mid-cycle role changes can cause evaluation data to disappear. Forms that aren't saved in exactly the right sequence lose progress. Without continuous autosave, principals learn to double-check everything — and build their own backup processes just to be sure. The cost isn't just the lost data. It's the time spent working around a system instead of working in it.
Frontline users describe a platform that demands constant guidance. One principal in Wisconsin sits with new teachers individually to guide them through missed steps. Even veteran staff forget processes when the platform changes without warning.
"It's not super intuitive... People always forget steps."
When experienced educators consistently forget workflows, the problem isn't training - it's that the platform makes simple tasks unnecessarily complex. Districts describe navigation as "menu within menu within menu" - layers of clicks just to reach basic functions. Small form edits require rebuilding entire evaluation cycles from scratch. The hidden cost: every hour spent training staff on Frontline's interface is an hour not spent on instruction, curriculum, or actual educator development. And unlike platforms built for ease of use, that training never stops.
Districts describe Frontline support as a revolving door of agents with no institutional memory. Every ticket means re-explaining your district context, your configuration, your previous issues. That's the fundamental problem with a ticket queue model: no one actually knows your district. You don't have a partner. You have a call center that treats every interaction as a first contact. Simple questions become multi-day escalations because the agent handling your case today isn't the same person who helped you last week.
When you're navigating complex evaluation timelines, state reporting requirements, and annual turnover in administrative roles, transactional support isn't sufficient. What districts need isn't someone who knows their district and can help them stay ahead, not just catch up.
Frontline grew through acquisition, adding products to its portfolio over time. The result isn't just a catalog of tools — it's an architecture that was never designed to work as one system. Data doesn't flow between modules. The experience in one product doesn't carry context from another. Districts end up exporting from one tool and importing to another to answer questions that should be answerable in seconds.
The compounding cost is invisible until you see the alternative. Every hour spent managing data across products that don't talk to each other is an hour a connected platform eliminates entirely. The gap isn't about features. It's about architecture — and that's not something a roadmap update fixes.
"The cost has gone up and we haven't felt necessarily that the service has matched."
— Director of Curriculum, Arizona district
Multiple districts report Frontline pricing increases year after year while the platform itself feels frozen. The data loss problems persist. The manual tagging requirements remain. The support model hasn't improved. The interface is still buried in nested menus.
The cost of staying isn't static. It compounds.
Districts that have made the switch consistently describe the same surprise: it was easier than they expected, and the ROI came faster than they anticipated.
Wisconsin Rapids: zero implementation issues, 2-hour training, staff who could navigate independently on day one.
Lincoln-Way: 135+ hours saved annually, PD administration cost reduced 57%.
Stevenson: 17 cycles managed without the friction, evaluators who needed no formal training because the interface was intuitive.
Twin Rivers: cut PD management time by 75%, freed up administrative capacity, and watched teacher engagement rise.
These districts stopped paying the hidden costs.
The switch never feels like the right time. There's always a contract year left, a busy season ahead, a team that's finally memorized the workarounds. But every year of staying is another year of lost principal time, preventable data loss, and support that doesn't know your district—while modern platforms move further ahead.
The cost of staying isn't what Frontline can't do today. It's how much more you'll lose tomorrow - and how far behind you'll be when you finally decide the workarounds aren’t worth it anymore.
Ready to see what modern educator evaluation looks like?
See the detailed breakdown and real district results in our complete KickUp vs. Frontline comparison.
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