Technology has always been integral to education, from the abacus to AI. Using these tools, teaching their proper use, and embracing new developments help us better prepare students for the world they'll one day be leading. While devices matter, the information systems they access for communication, task management, and information processing are what now make technology truly transformational. This year, Darlington began a significant project to completely overhaul our information systems. Over six weekly blogs, I'll explain why we're making these changes and how they'll impact our community.
Darlington launched its first website in 1997 (take a trip back in time here). While simple, remarkably many of the "features" it introduced still exist today. We also had a custom system for managing grades, developed by long-time faculty member Rick Buice. After submitting my first grades by scantron and writing comments on five-part carbonless paper, we agreed there must be a better way. Darlington launched one of the first online gradebooks the following year, setting us on a path to today's custom website, student information systems, and school management tools. This approach gave us flexibility to innovate and tailor systems to our unique needs, but it also brought unique challenges.
A school is in the business of educating students, not developing software. The demands of maintaining custom systems only increased: evolving school needs, new technologies, security requirements, and individual expectations exceeded our capacity to sustain this work with limited resources. In 2023, weighing reliability and sustainability challenges, we made the decision to move away from this model. With growing concerns about our long-standing outsourced systems for admission, development, and finances, the time was perfect to reconsider all of our information systems.
What followed was extensive research by stakeholders across departments to find the best replacement solution. Our goals were ambitious: a single core database, intercommunicating platforms, systems that preserved important features, and reliable, innovative partners—all while remaining affordable. In short, a solution that lets us focus on being a great school, not software developers. Fortunately, the market now had far more options than it did in 1997!
Here are the key solutions we identified for our new information systems along with an implementation timeline:
Core Database Foundation: Veracross (June 2024-May 2025)
A comprehensive solution for independent schools with a single database at its core. This replaces admission, advancement, and accounting systems, plus our in-house academic system. If you enrolled your child for next year, you've already used it!
Learning Management System: Toddle (Fall 2025)
Provides daily academic features for assignments, gradebook, attendance, and class communication. This platform will enhance curriculum integration and faculty lesson planning, with tools to assist teachers with effectively and safely incorporating AI into their work with students.
Health Management System: Magnus Health (Fall 2025)
Manages student physicals, medical insurance, vaccination records, health history, treatments, medications, alerts, and more.
Student Life and Emergency Response: Reach (Fall 2025)
Provides services for student life and boarding management, such as leaves, checks, duty faculty support, and events. It will take over emergency response functions, including text alerts and internal communications.
Website: Digistorm and Vidigami (Fall 2026)
Our website transitions to Digistorm, which is working directly with us to expand their feature set to serve our extensive needs, while beloved photo galleries move to Vidigami.
Veracross will act as our database hub, with all other systems integrating bi-directionally. The result will be a stable, feature-rich set of systems that will serve Darlington well into the future—and at a cost more effective than continuing in-house development.
These changes mean our community will experience significant transitions over the next few months and year. To help our community understand the transition, I'll blog every Friday for the next six weeks diving deeper into each system, discussing the implications of navigating multiple platforms, highlighting new opportunities, and honestly addressing challenges. I'll also cover practical considerations like timelines, user tasks, training resources, and transition tips.
Next week, I'll focus on Veracross and how its single-database system will improve experiences and enhance services, including new constituent portals. Do you have questions or thoughts—features you'd hate to lose or would love to have, or perhaps concerns about security or privacy? Please share them using our Information Systems Questions form. I'll incorporate responses into future blogs and FAQs.
Darlington's first "home page" launched in 1997. The site introduced many features still in use today.
