“We looked at seven companies, and KickUp was the needle in the haystack. A district our size needs a partner that can scale and that focuses on educator growth the way we do. KickUp was the missing piece.”
Most large districts reach the same point with professional learning sooner or later. The system they've used for years still runs, but the district has grown past what it was chosen for. Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), the largest district in North Carolina and the 13th largest in the nation, reached that point with PowerSchool and took it as a chance to rethink what it needed. The questions it faced are the ones any district asks: which partner can handle a district this size, and how do you make the move without disrupting thousands of staff?
Nichole McCullers, Director of Leadership, stepped in to lead that work in April, picking up a project a previous team had started. It was her first implementation, and it would reach more than 20,000 staff. Four months later, every school in the district was live in KickUp.
It started with knowing what WCPSS needed in a partner, and it led to something Nichole’s team had never had before.
Since 2017, WCPSS had managed professional learning and student records in PowerSchool. With student data privacy a top priority and North Carolina's purchase of a statewide student data system, now was the time for the district to focus on educator growth and entrust that work to a partner who specializes in it.
"We knew finding the right fit would be hard at our size," Nichole says. "We wanted a company that could tailor to exactly what we needed and still grow with a district like ours." About seven vendors answered the district’'s RFP, and three points kept KickUp ahead of the rest.
The first was capacity. WCPSS needed a platform for all staff across 203 schools, and KickUp already supported districts that size.
The second was continuity. Teachers rely on years of records for licensure, and several vendors couldn’t include the full licensure history.
The third was a platform that covered everything WCPSS needed without the clutter. At the district’s size, every confusing screen turns into hundreds of help requests, and some of the platforms the team reviewed felt clunky. In KickUp, everyday tasks are accessible in one-click, and the details the district’s old system never had are built in. “Everything we wanted is right here,” Nichole says. “There’s not a feature we don’t have, and so many little smart touches our staff love.”
Nichole credits that combination of scale and simplicity to focus. "It's not about all the different things a company can offer," she says. "KickUp focuses on educator growth and professional learning, and that shows."
Switching systems at this size feels risky, and it should. Every teacher's learning record is on the line, along with the patience of thousands of staff. WCPSS lowered that risk through careful planning, a phased launch, and a partner that had done this work before.
Nichole was picking up a rollout another team had started. She’ll admit she was nervous going in. She leaned on KickUp’s experience moving other districts off PowerSchool and asked direct questions, like how Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools had handled the same switch and what they would do differently.
Her team organized the rollout around a four-phase implementation plan from KickUp and worked through it one phase at a time. It proved useful enough that the district’s technology department asked to borrow the format. KickUp's Client Success Manager helped keep it on track with check-ins and reminders before each deadline. Throughout, Nichole says, the team's focus on educator growth showed in how they guided her.
WCPSS also phased the launch, bringing central office staff and facilitators on first, then year-round schools, then the rest of the district. Each group learned the system before the next arrived, and facilitators with summer trainings had time to practice first. Along the way, KickUp carried the district’s learning history back to 2017 into the new system.
Nichole's biggest lesson sits on the district side: acknowledge the nerves, then build an internal team. That means someone from HR who can produce the staff file, someone from technology who has handled a migration, and someone who knows the contract process. "KickUp came with a team of experts," she says. "A district needs one too. This can't sit on one person."
A few months in, the work feels different at WCPSS. Staff find what they need on their own, through KickUp’s help topics, short videos, and the built-in AI feature, and they print their own signed transcripts without sending a request.
The bigger change is visibility. Every morning, Nichole's team opens the calendar and dashboard and, for the first time, sees professional learning across all 203 schools and 47 other district buildings. Facilitators read their feedback and adjust their sessions, using a post-session survey Nichole’s team revised with their KickUp Customer Success Manager. This spring, Nichole and her team plan to look at registration, attendance, and cancellation data to decide what to offer next.
WCPSS wanted a trusted place to support educator growth across the district, and Nichole’s team helped bring that vision to life at every stage. When other districts ask about KickUp, Nichole keeps it short: “A lifesaver.”
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