12
Schools
4,200
Students
3 weeks
To full launch
Most district-wide rollouts we've seen fail for a boring reason: the first training goes fine, and then everyone quietly goes back to whatever they were doing before, because nobody followed up. Ridgeview School District's twelve-school rollout is the counterexample we point to most often, and it wasn't because they had more resources than anyone else.
What made this one different
Dana Whitfield, the district's Director of Technology, had already been through one failed coding initiative before Sparki. That experience shaped almost every decision in this rollout.
Watch: the 90-second recap of Ridgeview's rollout, from kickoff to first lesson.
The three-week timeline
- Week 1 — rostering synced from the district's existing Clever setup, all 12 schools at once
- Week 1–2 — every teacher completed live training in small groups of 15, not one giant auditorium session
- Week 3 — all 12 schools launched together, with a Sparki onboarding specialist on call all day
The part that actually mattered
It wasn't the technology. It was that someone from Sparki stayed reachable for the entire first semester instead of disappearing after week three.
"We'd tried a district-wide coding rollout once before and it stalled because teachers felt abandoned after the first training. Sparki's team stayed involved through the whole first semester. That's the difference between a pilot that dies and one that becomes policy."
Dana Whitfield, Director of Technology, Ridgeview School District
One year later
89% of the teachers who started that first semester were still actively teaching with Sparki a year in — well above what Ridgeview had seen with any previous tool.
Thinking about a rollout like this?
Talk to our education team about what it'd look like for your district.