A start-up school with start-up problems

Inside Cape Girardeau’s Lynwood Baptist Church, Lynwood Christian Academy (LCA) opened three years ago with 80 students, 15 teachers, and one spiral notebook to document instruction. When Eva Mitchell—teacher turned Director of Curriculum & Instruction—learned the school’s upcoming ACSI accreditation visit would demand hard evidence of teacher growth, she realized: sticky-note compliments wouldn’t cut it .

Her principal was juggling church construction and seldom reached classrooms , so Eva went searching for a solution she could run herself. One late-night Google session introduced her to Education Walkthrough, and the “evaluation problem” became a design opportunity.

The design breakthrough—not just faster feedback

Rather than rely on pre-made rubrics, Eva built her own observation templates—trimming the bulky Danielson framework and inserting criteria that reflect LCA’s biblical-worldview standards. Teachers received printed copies of the form before the first walkthrough, so expectations were crystal-clear .

“We created our own templates and they’ve worked great for us.”

Key shifts enabled by the custom-template approach

A narrative of data-driven leadership

• October → January → April: three formal evaluations per teacher, each tagged to the custom template and stored in the dashboard .
• Monthly five-minute “snapshot” walkthroughs fed additional data points—whenever life didn’t “catch up” to the small staff .
• By spring, Eva could open the Crosswalk and spot trends at a glance: classroom-management rock stars, questioning techniques that needed coaching, and—importantly—whether teachers were actually using the new curriculum .

When one instructional coach lagged behind on visits, the same dashboard flagged the gap, prompting Eva to build a shared calendar and rebalance workloads .

Impact beyond the timestamp

• Accreditation confidence – ACSI reviewers received a single export showing rubric alignment, scores over time, and photo/video evidence from classrooms—all generated by the app.
• Strategic PD, not guesswork – LCA’s summer workshops will zero-in on the two rubric strands that averaged a “2” across the school rather than scattershot topics .
• Teacher empowerment & culture – Knowing exactly “what great looks like” sparked teacher interest in peer walkthroughs for the coming year .
• Leadership visibility – Even while leading a capital campaign, the principal could brief the board on instructional progress using Eva’s dashboard exports .

Why this matters for emerging schools

Real-time feedback may spark immediate growth, but the true breakthrough for young or fast-scaling schools like LCA is owning an observation platform you can shape to your DNA. When the tool bends to your mission—whether that’s a faith-infused worldview, a dual-language mandate, or a project-based learning model—it stops being a one-size-fits-all checklist and becomes a strategic nerve center. Leaders can weave mission-specific look-fors into every walkthrough, watch classroom trends emerge without hiring a data analyst, and walk into board or accreditation meetings with gold-standard evidence in a single export. In other words, customizable design turns a simple feedback loop into a culture-building, accountability-driving engine that scales insight as quickly as the school itself grows.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Align evaluation to your values – Swap generic rubrics for templates that spotlight the practices your community cares about, from biblical integration to maker-space collaboration.
• Surface patterns without a data team – Built-in dashboards reveal strengths, gaps, and coaching priorities at a glance, freeing leaders to act instead of crunch numbers.
• Prove growth to every stakeholder – One click generates clear, time-stamped evidence for accreditors, boards, and parents, demonstrating that improvement is intentional—not anecdotal.

Key Takeaway — From “Have-to” to “Want-to”

Lynwood Christian Academy proved that when an observation platform doubles as a design studio for your own rubrics, reports, and workflows, evaluation flips from a box-checking chore into a lever for mission fulfillment. In just one school year, the team went from a single spiral notebook to a living data stream that:

• Earned external credibility — ACSI reviewers and the school board saw time-stamped growth evidence aligned to faith-based standards, not generic metrics.
• Gave leaders X-ray vision — Dashboards surfaced strengths, blind spots, and workload gaps in real time, so coaching and resources landed where they mattered most.
• Empowered every teacher — Clear, custom rubrics and instant transparency turned walk-throughs into collaborative goal-setting sessions instead of one-sided evaluations.
• Scaled with the school’s ambitions — Because the templates are infinitely editable, LCA can layer in new initiatives—dual-language, STEM, service learning—without rebuilding its feedback system.

Bottom line: thoughtful customization transformed evaluation from a compliance headache into a strategic asset—fueling culture, accountability, and continuous improvement at a pace even a fast-growing start-up school can sustain.