Thompson School District serves some 15,000 students across more than 30 schools in northern Colorado. Its records office manages requests from current and former students, parents, other school districts, and companies verifying graduation information for prospective employers. The system it previously used for that work was brittle and difficult to use. Concourse launched a new platform in five weeks, just in time for August, the district’s busiest stretch for records requests.
The problem
Thompson School District receives roughly 3,200 records requests annually. For years, requesting those records was harder than it needed to be. “People just couldn’t navigate the old platform,” says Amanda P., a student records technician. Students and parents kept getting stuck while trying to request their records. Amanda even made a how-to guide with pictures to help requesters.
The platform made the records team’s work harder, too. Staff would sometimes have to fill out requests for students and parents who got stuck on the old platform. Even small errors could hold up a request: if a requester made a mistake on a form, such as entering the wrong initials, “the whole form would just freeze,” says Melissa M., a records technician at the district. The platform would occasionally go offline during busy stretches, forcing staff to email records to requesters. Fixes to the platform were slow to come.
Thompson School District issued a request for proposals for a new platform in March 2026. When the procurement process finished, the district had just over a month of service left on its previous platform.
The solution
Concourse stood up the new system in five weeks. “It was kind of crazy and awesome the way that they got everything done,” says Amanda.
Anyone can start a request on the new platform from a single link without creating an account. The site first asks whether the person is a student, parent or guardian, or an organization such as another K-12 school district or verification company. From there, it guides them to the right form for the record they need. Once they’ve submitted a request, they can track its status.
The platform makes things easier for the district’s records team, too. They can see when a requester opened or downloaded their records and get an alert if someone tried using an expired download link. They can also contact any requester directly, which was difficult on the previous platform. Requesters now write back, sometimes just to say thank you. “I think that’s because it’s easy,” says Melissa. “Otherwise they wouldn’t bother.”
Changes to the platform now come quickly. For example, some parents were filing requests under the wrong categories, so the district’s staff worked with Concourse to reword the buttons to make them clearer to requesters. “We put in a request for a change and they usually have it done within the day,” says Amanda.
The results
Between August 1 and September 29 of this year, the district received 1,181 records requests—a 36% increase from the same period last year. Staff attribute some of that increase to how much easier it is for students, parents, and organizations to use the platform. “I really do think that people would go in to request their records on our previous platform and be like, ‘This is too hard, I don’t want to do this,’ and then they just wouldn’t do it,” says Amanda. “Now they’re like, ‘I can do this in two seconds.’”