Executive Summary

Paulding County Schools serves nearly 32,000 students in a bedroom community west of Atlanta. As a low-wealth, low-poverty district where the school system is the largest employer, strategic investments matter—especially when it comes to building capacity across the entire organization.

When the district's antiquated professional learning platform became so outdated it could no longer send emails, leaders knew they needed a modern solution. But they also saw an opportunity: to create a system that would support not just teachers, but every single employee—from bus drivers to cabinet members—in alignment with their strategic plan to "build capacity from classroom to cabinet."

KickUp didn't just replace a failing system. It became the connective tissue for Paulding's approach to professional learning, coaching, and federal compliance—while being so intuitive that training became a non-issue. The result: a district where 4,000+ employees access professional learning through one unified platform, feedback actually drives decisions, and implementation was the smoothest the team had seen.

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The Challenge

Paulding County had been using a professional learning platform that had served them adequately in its early years but had become increasingly problematic and clunky:

• An Antiquated Platform: The system had degraded to the point where it couldn't send emails, communicate with other systems, or generate feedback forms—the staff couldn’t trust it to be their system of record.
• No Uniformity: Without a modern feedback system, staff resorted to creating Microsoft Forms scattered across the district, making it impossible to collect consistent data.
• Transcript Nightmares: When teachers left or needed documentation for certification, the manual process of pulling transcripts created bottlenecks and frustration.
• Fragmented Data: With no centralized system, leaders couldn't demonstrate the full scope of professional learning happening across all employee groups—a key requirement for their strategic plan and Title II reporting.
• Missing Pieces for Certification: The district needed robust coaching and mentoring data to achieve state induction certification, but had no systematic way to track it.

The Solution

Paulding County implemented KickUp to create an integrated system for professional learning management, coaching, and federal program compliance. But their approach to implementation was strategic:

Everyone In From Day One: Rather than phasing in by department, Paulding loaded every employee except substitute teachers into the system immediately. This meant when new departments wanted to use KickUp (like the growing safety team), their staff were already in the system—training became the only step, not setup.

Minimal, Targeted Training: The district conducted just two initial training sessions:

• One for district coordinators (content experts who deliver most teacher PD)
• One for school-level EACs (Evaluation and Assessment Coordinators)

In both sessions, participants brought their actual work and practiced creating events in real time. After that? The system became self-sustaining through peer mentoring and self-guided materials.

Impact & Results

Time Back in Educators' Hands

All staff can find and access their own professional learning opportunities, transcripts, and records—no emails to central office, no waiting on approvals, no bottlenecks. Employees can easily take their records with them if they leave the district. What used to require manual intervention now happens in seconds, giving both teachers and administrators time back in their day.

Universal Adoption Across Every Role

Paulding now has 4,000+ employees—from cabinet to bus drivers—accessing professional learning through KickUp, making it one of the few district investments that truly reaches all adults in the organization. When the safety team grew from 2 to 20+ people and wanted to use KickUp, they were trained and operational immediately.

Training scaled effortlessly: New EACs receive one 15-20 minute session with a mentor EAC and access to training materials—no district-level training required. 

State Recognition

Paulding achieved state induction certification as one of only six Georgia districts to earn this recognition, with KickUp's coaching and mentoring data serving as a key component of their application. The district now systematically tracks coaching cycles for year one through three teachers through their formalized induction program.

Data That Closes the Loop

The district now uses professional learning feedback and data to drive real change. District leaders show educators the exact feedback from previous sessions and explain how it shaped the current session's design—creating visible accountability and responsiveness.

All PLC data, coaching cycles, and professional learning hours flow directly into federal reports and monitoring documentation, simplifying Title II compliance. Leaders layer KickUp's qualitative data (feedback, coaching observations, walkthrough trends) alongside quantitative student performance data from their Power BI platform—providing a complete picture rather than piecemeal insights.

The Future

Paulding continues to expand how they use KickUp. The district is exploring new data dashboards that let leaders filter and compare professional learning trends in real time—for example, tracking which sessions generate the strongest feedback across different employee groups or identifying coaching patterns that correlate with teacher growth. They're also integrating KickUp's walkthrough tools with Georgia's state rubric for federally identified schools, creating a unified view of classroom observations alongside coaching and professional learning data. As word spreads internally, more departments are asking to bring their training into the platform—the safety team's success has sparked interest from other non-instructional groups who want the same visibility and ease of use.

Conclusion

Paulding County Schools proves that the right technology doesn't just replace what's broken—it enables what wasn't possible before. By choosing a platform intuitive enough to require minimal training, flexible enough to serve every employee group, and robust enough to support federal compliance, the district transformed professional learning from a fragmented compliance exercise into a strategic driver of organizational capacity.

For districts looking to modernize professional learning infrastructure, Paulding's story offers a clear lesson: when implementation is effortless and adoption is universal, leaders can focus on what matters—using data to make better decisions and building capacity in everyone.

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