Why I built Scholaris: A teacher’s solution for progress tracking that doesn’t waste after-school time
It’s 9:27 PM on a Tuesday in October, and my kitchen table is covered in three things: a half-empty mug of cold coffee, a handful of orange Goldfish crackers my 8-year-old left behind after her homework, and four spiral notebooks full of student progress notes. I’d just spilled a full sip of lukewarm tea on the notebook I use for behavior check-ins, and the ink was bleeding into the margins, turning October 12’s note about Mia’s conflict during recess into a gray blob. I closed the notebook, leaned back in my chair, and thought I’d had enough.
I’ve been a 4th grade general ed teacher for 12 years, and progress tracking has always been the part of the job that eats my nights. The district gave us a fancy new enterprise app three years ago, that costs more per year than my entire classroom semester budget. But every time I try to use it, I have to click through seven different menus just to log that Javi mastered long division that week. If I pull it up during guided reading to jot a quick note, it takes longer to load than my whole 10-minute check-in with the group. Half the time it logs me out automatically and deletes whatever I was typing.
My co-worker Sarah, who runs our school’s special ed program, stopped by my classroom the next morning, complaining that the app couldn’t be customized to track IEP goals the way she needed, so she was still doing everything on paper. I remembered that I’d taken a basic coding night class a few years back, just for something to do that wasn’t grading or lesson planning. I’d messed around with a few small projects for my classroom, nothing big. That night, I opened up my old notes and started drafting the first version of what would become Scholaris.
The first version was garbage. I had a big blue button that was supposed to save notes, but it actually deleted them half the time. I lost three weeks of reading level data before I fixed that bug. I asked three other teachers at my school to test it, and they gave me straight, no-BS feedback that only other teachers can give: The font’s too small, I can’t read it when I’m standing up at the front of the room. I need to add custom categories for things like parent communication check-ins. Why is this only working for reading? I need to track math fluency too. I tweaked it, one feature at a time, over 18 months. Now it’s an iPad app, because that’s what all of us carry around the classroom with us anyway, right? You don’t have to haul a laptop around, just pull your iPad out of your lanyard pocket and tap.
Back in March, I had a conference with the parents of a student named Leo, who’d been quiet all year and struggled with reading comprehension even though he could decode words perfectly. His parents had started to think I hadn’t noticed, because at their last conference the year before, the previous teacher couldn’t find any of her notes and just gave a vague update. I pulled up Scholaris, flipped to Leo’s page, and showed them 12 weeks of quick notes: 1/17: struggled to identify main idea in our nonfiction unit, got overwhelmed when asked to summarize out loud. 1/24: same issue, tried graphic organizer, seemed to help a little. 2/7: small group practice twice this week, can summarize 3-paragraph text with minimal prompts. Leo’s mom leaned in and said, “No teacher’s ever showed us this much detail before.” That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a tool to make my life easier. It made me a better teacher for the kids, and it made parents feel more connected to what’s actually happening in the classroom, not just getting a generic report card every 12 weeks.
Most education apps are built by teams of developers who’ve never spent a full day in a K-8 classroom. They build them for district administrators, who care about standardized reporting and data aggregation, not about the teacher who needs to jot a 2-word note between classes. The administrative bloat that comes with big-name apps doesn’t just waste teacher time—it takes time away from kids. Before I used Scholaris, I spent 3 to 4 hours every Sunday night updating all my progress notes. Now I do 90% of it on the fly, during class: when I finish a guided reading check-in with a kid, I tap one checkbox to log their level, add a 1-sentence note if I need it, and move on. I end up spending 20 minutes a week max wrapping up any missed entries. That’s 3 extra hours I can spend planning fun activities for my class, or just leaving school on time to go to my own kid’s soccer practice.
For teachers who are fed up with their current tracking tools, the small concrete step I tell everyone to try first is this: before you go looking for a new app, sit down for 10 minutes and write down every single thing you actually need to track weekly, then cross out anything that’s only required for district end-of-semester reporting. You don’t need to update that stuff weekly, I promise. Most of us end up doing extra work just because the app makes us. For parents: if your kid’s teacher seems rushed or like they don’t have time for a long conversation at drop-off, it’s rarely because they don’t care. It’s usually because they’re spending 3 extra hours a week jumping through hoops for clunky administrative tools that were never built to help them teach.
I’m still tweaking Scholaris. Last week a kindergarten teacher who started using it emailed me asking to add custom checkboxes for things like lunch preferences and potty training reminders, stuff that’s a big deal in her classroom that big apps never think to include. I’m adding that this month. It’s still not fancy. It doesn’t have flashy graphics or integrate with every single district system out there. Some days I still forget to log a note, and I have to jot it on a post-it to add later, just like I used to. But it works for me, and it works for the 200+ other teachers who use it now. It’s just a tool, built by someone who knows what it’s like to stand in front of 26 9-year-olds all day, and just wants something that gets out of the way.
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