“With our old systems, you’d click 42 times to pull a report that was half of what you needed. With KickUp, it’s three clicks and it’s all right there. The lift on my team was minimal, and now I get daily notifications that teachers are in there using it without a single issue. In my job, silence is a good thing.”
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Bartlett City Schools in Tennessee serves roughly 9,000 students across 11 schools, supported by a staff of 1,200. Over the past several years, the district cycled through two different PD platforms, each leaving the team working around the same daily challenges.
In spring 2026, Bartlett made the switch to KickUp Learning. Three weeks later, teachers were enrolled, five years of historical PD data had been migrated, and sessions were running. This is the story of what that looked like from both sides of the implementation table: Joey Mitchell, the district's Director of Technology, and Dr. Taylor Tartera, PD Supervisor.
For Taylor, the challenge with the district's previous systems was less about any single broken feature and more about the cumulative amount of workarounds. Teachers could register for sessions online, but confirming attendance required sign-in sheets that then had to be manually entered. Feedback was locked behind super-admin access, so facilitators never saw their own data without someone converting it to a PDF and emailing it out. During the district's annual learning day, the PD team would split a stack of 60 attendance sheets and check them off one by one.
Two years ago, Taylor stopped using the feedback feature in their platform altogether. For the district's biggest PD day, he had teachers fill out a Google Form instead. "We shouldn't have to do that if we're paying for a professional platform," he said.
On the technology side, Joey felt the same drag from a different angle. Reporting was hard to pull, session management was clunky, and the data living in the old system was a headache to work with.
When the time came to make a change, the district didn't just default to KickUp. Taylor and his team evaluated several platforms, including all-in-one systems teachers already used for other tasks. The convenience of a single system was appealing.
What swayed them was focus and support. Taylor wanted a platform built specifically for professional learning, and a support team he could reach quickly when questions came up.
For Joey, the draw was different but pointed the same way. As a ClassLink district, Bartlett could handle user provisioning and single sign-on without building custom data exports, and routing access through ClassLink kept the whole system behind credentials his team already controlled. In a sector where districts and vendors are constant targets, that mattered.
Taylor set a tight timeline: go live before teachers left for summer. From kickoff to launch it took three weeks.
On the technical side, the work moved fast. As a ClassLink district, provisioning and single sign-on were up within two hours. KickUp's integration meant no custom data exports, and keeping everything behind credentials his team already controlled was a security win Joey hadn't taken for granted. Five years of district PD records, originally organized by event rather than by user, were cleaned up, uploaded, and verified within three days.
On the teacher-facing side, what stood out to Taylor was how little the rollout demanded of him. KickUp's ready-made video walkthroughs and quick-link guides meant he didn't have to build training materials from scratch or visit every building. He adapted the resources lightly for Bartlett, then offered principals a choice: have him run a short training, or roll it out in-house. Nine of eleven schools handled it themselves, with no problems.
The rollout also moved teachers off paper sign-in for the first time, onto digital attendance confirmation. Despite being a new habit for staff, the mechanics were simple enough that most teachers logged in and confirmed their own attendance before leaving the session, work that used to fall to the PD team after the fact.
The clearest returns have been in time. A new platform usually means a wave of help-desk tickets; Joey braced for one, and across eight instructional technology coaches, he has fielded two questions total since go-live.
The bigger savings show up in attendance and feedback, two tasks that used to consume hours. Confirming attendance ran about 30 minutes per session, and far longer after district-wide events, when the team would hand-process some 60 sign-in sheets. Now teachers confirm their own attendance on the spot.
Feedback saw a similar jump. In the old system it reached only super-admins, who had to export it to a PDF and email it out before any facilitator could see it. Now facilitators see their session feedback live, the moment it lands, a step that used to take days and now takes none.
Bartlett's experience points to a few things worth holding onto if your district is weighing a similar move.
A district-wide switch doesn't have to be a long, disruptive project. Bartlett moved its entire PD operation, plus five years of history, in three weeks, with teachers in the new system before summer.
Purpose-built beats all-in-one when the job is specific. The all-in-one appeal of a broader platform is real, but when professional development is your core work, a platform built around that job shows up differently — in the product experience and in the support.
And it works best when the technical and instructional sides both get what they need. Joey wanted a system that integrated cleanly and wouldn't bury his team in tickets. Taylor wanted one teachers would use without hand-holding. Bartlett got both, which is why the rollout held together instead of stalling in one department.
Taylor's advice to any PD director considering the switch is simple:
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You can't trust everything you read on the internet.
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