Edupoint Presents 6th Annual Partner for Life Award to Kyrene School District

16-year partner district embraces innovation and helps drive improvements in new products

Edupoint® Educational Systems, creator of the industry-leading Synergy® Education Platform for K-12 student information and learning management, is pleased to announce that Kyrene School District (KSD) has been selected as the recipient of the company’s 2021 Partner for Life Award. Edupoint Founder and CEO Bob Weathers presented the award to Damian Nichols, Executive Director of Information Technology for KSD, at the 2021 Synergy Connect Users Conference last month in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Kyrene School District serves a diverse population of approximately 18,000 students across 26 schools in five municipalities. The district’s information technology team provides broad support for everything from classroom devices to the network and infrastructure technology they rely on, with a focus on providing the best possible services to everyone in the KSD community. 

For the 2020-21 school year, Kyrene School District launched Kyrene Digital Academy, an all-online K-8 school with live instruction following the same daily bell schedule used by other schools in the district. The move presented challenges for everyone involved, requiring flexibility from parents and adaptability from students and teachers, who had to learn new ways of doing things outside of a traditional classroom setting.

“One of the first things we had to do was nail down the tools that we were going to use,” said Dr. Kyle Ross, Principal at Kyrene Digital Academy.  “We knew we needed to call on our existing partnerships in order to make it as seamless as possible.”

“It has been a huge team effort to make sure everything went off without a hitch and learning continued,” Nichols said. “Edupoint was quick to react and make sure that the tools we were using integrated together so that students didn't have to go to three or four different systems in order to attend class online. They were flexible in receiving feedback and making changes to the products we were depending on. Because of that partnership, we really set students and staff up for success.”

“Kyrene joined the Edupoint family as one of our first client districts in 2005,” said Bob Weathers, Founder and CEO at Edupoint. “Following their initial success with Synergy SIS, the district has embraced one new module after another and now runs the full Synergy ecosystem, enjoying the many user-experience and data-flow benefits it provides. All along the way Kyrene has been an enthusiastic partner, continually providing us with invaluable feedback that has helped make the Synergy platform better for every user. I am thrilled to recognize Kyrene School District as this year’s Partner for Life Award recipient.”

Edupoint has awarded $10,000 to Kyrene School District to be granted as a student scholarship.