CUSTOMER STORY
Lancaster City Schools Gains Consistency, Efficiency, and Clarity with Brolly
Background
Lancaster City Schools is a mid-size Ohio school district in which staff, students, and resources frequently shift between buildings and grade levels. Prior to Brolly, the district’s Intervention Specialists (ISs) and Special Education staff each independently tracked Specially Designed Instruction (SDI) minutes and documentation — sometimes using paper, spreadsheets, or local digital systems. Over time, this patchwork approach led to inconsistencies, gaps in historical records, and difficult transitions when staff or students moved.
District leadership recognized the need for a unified system that would make documentation accessible, standardized, and sustainable from year to year. That’s when Lancaster turned to Brolly.
The Challenge: Fragmented Documentation & Time Drain
Across Lancaster:
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Intervention Specialists were spending excessive time building or maintaining their own tracking systems rather than focusing on student support.
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Because each IS or building used different formats or storage locations, retrieving documentation from previous years (for audits, reassignments, or compliance) was cumbersome or impossible.
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When students moved between schools or ISs, historical SDI data didn’t reliably follow them, making it harder to maintain service continuity.
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Administrators lacked a centralized, real-time view of whether all students were receiving their required minutes, or where “make-up” minutes might be needed.
These challenges translated not only into lost hours but also into risks of missed services or compliance issues.
Why Lancaster Chose Brolly
Lancaster’s decision was driven by several key priorities:
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Uniformity and portability. They needed a platform that would ensure that SDI documentation traveled with the student seamlessly, regardless of building or IS.
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Time savings. The district wanted to reduce the burden on intervention staff so they could focus on instruction, not paperwork.
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Administrative oversight. Leaders needed real-time access to building and district reporting, to see where minutes were being delivered and where gaps existed.
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Ease of adoption. The system had to be intuitive for ISs and staff—not a heavy, cumbersome tool that would require excessive training.
Ultimately, Brolly’s focus on documentation, reporting, and flexibility aligned well with Lancaster’s goals.
Implementation & Rollout
Lancaster elected to phase in Brolly by beginning with core buildings or pilot teams. Training sessions were held for Intervention Specialists to guide them through the system’s features—entering SDI minutes, viewing student histories, and generating reports. Early support and coaching helped ease the transition and built confidence in using the tool.
As staff used Brolly more, the benefits became clear: the learning curve smoothed quickly, and most ISs found the system more efficient than their previous methods.
Impact & Early Wins
From the perspective of staff and administration, the benefits of Brolly already stand out:
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Streamlined documentation.
“Lancaster City Schools has found that Brolly helps our district streamline our Specially Designed Instruction documentation. Once our Intervention Specialists got used to the program, they found it to be a less time-consuming way to document their minutes. Because our district is large and students and teachers move around, before Brolly, we discovered that different ISs and schools tracked their minutes differently, making it very difficult to locate documentation if it was needed the next year. With Brolly, there is no question about where the data is, and no matter where the student travels, there is seamless documentation of their SDI.” — Brenda Zeiders, Lancaster City Schools
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Transparent reporting & missed-minute alerts. Administrators can now run reports quickly and confidently know which students might be under-served, allowing proactive adjustments rather than reactive scramble.
“The most useful feature of Brolly for our Admin. is being able to pull up a report in minutes to be able to see all of the SDI in their building. At a glance they can see if minutes are missed on a student, so that they can address that. Teachers can also see at a glance if they have students they need to make up minutes for before the end of the 9 weeks.” — Brenda Zeiders, Lancaster City Schools
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Consistency over time. Because all documentation is now held centrally in Brolly, the district no longer faces the problem of “lost” or inaccessible records when students or staff change buildings or roles.
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Teacher buy-in. The majority of Intervention Specialists and special education staff have grown to prefer Brolly over their prior systems, finding that once they are comfortable with it, the day-to-day workflow is faster and more transparent.
Looking Ahead
As Lancaster moves forward, the district expects to consolidate even more of its special education tracking and compliance workflows into Brolly. They anticipate stronger audit readiness, better historical data access, and more collaborative conversations between intervention staff and school leadership.
In the long term, Lancaster envisions that reducing documentation overhead will free time and energy to focus more on instruction, intervention, and student growth.
