Switching from ClassDojo: a change-management problem, not a data problem
Districts plan this switch as a data migration and it fails as a change programme. Almost nothing you need is inside ClassDojo — the roster is in your SIS and the contact data you want is better there. What is inside ClassDojo is habit, and habit does not export.
| Record | Created by | District can retrieve | Where the real copy lives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student roster | Teacher or roster sync | Depends how it was provisioned | Your SIS |
| Parent contact details | Parents, at sign-up | Not centrally, if teacher-created | Your SIS, with custody data attached |
| Behaviour points and reports | Teachers | Per class, per teacher | Nowhere else |
| Classroom photos and portfolios | Teachers and students | Per class, manual | Nowhere else — plan for loss |
| Message history | Staff and families | Per class | Nowhere else — retention risk |
| Family app installs and attention | Years of habit | Not transferable | The actual project |
Two rows deserve a decision before you announce anything: photos and message history. Both may carry retention or records obligations, and neither has a copy anywhere else.
Decide the two irreversible things first
Photos and portfolios. Years of classroom photographs exist in one place with no second copy. Decide, before an announcement, whether the district is retrieving them, whether teachers are being asked to, or whether they are being allowed to lapse — and communicate that decision. Families will ask, and "we did not think about it" is the answer that generates complaints. Kastr will not help you here: we have no attachments, no photo storage and no video, so anything you want to keep needs a home elsewhere.
Message history. Communication between district employees and families about students may be subject to your state's public records and retention schedules. If that history is scattered across teacher-owned classes, work out your obligation with counsel before you deprecate the channel, not after somebody files a request.
The sequence that works, by term
Roughly one school year. Attempting it in a summer is where districts create the worst outcome: a mandate nobody was consulted on, imposed the week teachers return.
- Spring, before the decision. Ask which schools and which teachers are using it and for what. Separate behaviour points from family messaging in the answers — they are different needs and only one of them is being replaced.
- Late spring. Choose the platform and get the roster feed working against a real SIS extract. Register your 10DLC brand and campaign now; it takes two to six weeks and it gates everything with a phone number in it.
- Summer. Build the contact set from the SIS, not the app. Run consent collection. Train the front office first — they send more messages than anyone and they will find every defect in your setup within a week.
- Term 1. Both channels live. Official district communication moves to the new platform on day one; classroom traffic stays wherever teachers have it. Set the deprecation date now and say it out loud.
- Term 2. Close the old channel on the stated date. Publish what changed for teachers — a shorter list of concrete gains beats a long list of features.
The objection you will get, and the honest answer. "The new tool does not do points, and I cannot send photos." Both true. If behaviour points matter to your instructional model, keep a tool that does them and move only the official communication, or choose a platform with a behaviour module — Bloomz has one and we do not. Pretending the replacement is like-for-like is how a rollout loses the staff room in week two.
Rebuilding a contact set you can trust
The upside of leaving a self-service app is that you get to construct the contact set properly, once, rather than inheriting one whose provenance nobody knows.
Three things a district-grade set does that a parent sign-up list does not:
- Separates having a number from being allowed to use it. In Kastr, every contact point carries a
validationStateand aconsentStateindependently, along with its source and rank. "Confirmed mobile, consented for SMS, from the SIS, rank 1" is a different record from "unconfirmed number a parent typed in 2019", and you can query the difference. - Understands relationships. Selecting a student expands to their guardians automatically, so a message about a child reaches the adults responsible for that child rather than whoever joined a class channel.
- Survives a bad roster file. Our diff engine aborts the run with
aborted_guardrailif more than half your active records would be withdrawn — the exact shape of a truncated export, and the failure that turns a routine sync into a district with no reachable families.
On timing: we ship major releases in May with professional-development packs attached, and September to May is polish only. That is deliberate, and it means a summer implementation lands on a version that will not move underneath your training materials in October.
Questions people actually ask
Can a district export data from ClassDojo?
Only partially, and mostly at class level. Where classes were created by individual teachers on their own accounts, the district has no administrative route to the data at all. Roster-synced district deployments are better, but photos, portfolios and message history remain awkward to retrieve in bulk.
What happens to classroom photos and portfolios when we leave ClassDojo?
They stay where they are unless someone retrieves them, and there is no second copy anywhere. Decide before announcing the switch whether the district retrieves them, teachers do, or they lapse — and tell families which. Kastr does not store photos or attachments of any kind, so they will need a different home.
How do we get teachers to stop using ClassDojo after we switch?
A stated deprecation date announced by instructional leadership rather than IT, a term of overlap, and a clear account of what teachers gain. If you leave the old channel technically available with no date attached, a meaningful share of staff will simply keep using it, and you will be running two systems indefinitely.
Do we lose parent contact details when moving off ClassDojo?
You lose the app's copy, which you should not want anyway. The authoritative contact data is in your SIS with custody and relationship information attached, which a parent-entered sign-up list does not have. Rebuild from the roster and use the old list only to spot families the SIS is missing.
Switching is a weekend, and you get a receipt.
Our ParentSquare importer is MIT-licensed and runs without us. It validates your export, normalises phone numbers and languages, drops the junk guardian records, and emits a signed PDF receipt with a per-file SHA-256 manifest — a procurement artefact, not a developer log.