GENEVA – The Geneva District 304 school board this week approved a $100,000 five-year agreement with Schoology to provide a common learning platform for Geneva High School.

Assistant Superintendent for Learning and Teaching Andrew Barrett and Technology Director Michael Wilkes presented the plan at Monday’s school board meeting.

Most of the cost, 81%, will come from grants, with the rest from district funds, officials said.

Remote learning during the pandemic last year showed that teachers and students used different online resources to access their learning – and the variety was increasing exponentially, Barrett said.

“Over the last several years, we’ve transitioned to a one-to-one learning environment,” Barrett said. “The pandemic definitely increased our reliance on tech tools. We saw our teachers, our students, our educators get more creative and more adaptable while we were working through all this.”

The platform Schoology was endorsed by a majority of teachers as the best platform for a unified, consistent approach going forward, Barrett said.

“It was important to identify the right tool for the high school,” Wilkes said.

They received two responses to a request for proposals, with the best one determined to be Schoology.

The cost of a three-year agreement was nearly $67,000, but the recommendation was for a five-year agreement at a cost of $100,284, which comes with initial start-up implementation, licensing for 1,750 students and product support.

“It (the five-year plan) also sends that message to the staff and students that we are committed to this, making that investment in this for them,” Wilkes said.

“This was a lot of work and a big team effort on the part of a lot of people,” Barrett said.

Training and preparation will be done next spring and possibly through next summer for it to be officially rolled out in August 2022 for the 2022-23 school year, Barrett said.