Open with the grammar school. Add a grade every fall. Keep the same system.
Planning the logic school, a high school or a second campus? Then the system you start on decides whether that year also means moving every family to new software. Pearspark already does the work each stage adds. Built for schools of 20 to a few hundred students.
Four stages, one system
What each stage adds, and all of it is in Pearspark today. Switch off what you don't use yet; it stays out of sight, with nothing deleted, until you turn it back on.
- Stage 1
The founding class: grammar school
You're here when: You open with kindergarten through fifth or sixth grade, in a church building, with a founder who teaches and families who enrolled on trust.
Pearspark for classical schools- Tours and the application form on your own website, feeding a pipeline with interviews and decisions
- Attendance in seconds per class, and lesson plans with home days for a hybrid or four-day week
- Skills-checklist report cards for the youngest, built from ready-made parts
- Tuition invoices per family through your own Stripe account, and ESA invoices for the state scholarship
- Health records, with allergy flags on every class roster
- A parent app families install on their phones
- Stage 2
The logic school: grades 6 to 8
You're here when: The first class reaches sixth grade. Teachers want quarters, weighted categories, and a conduct section the handbook can stand behind.
Gradebook and report cards- A gradebook with categories and weights per class, posting term grades by quarter
- Letter-grade report cards with the virtues on them, one design per grade
- A weekly schedule by period, with chapel on it
- A behavior ladder that follows your handbook, with incidents documented
- Re-enrollment in the parent portal, with a count of who's returning, leaving or hasn't answered
- A year-end rollover that previews every promotion, and can be undone until the new year has work in it
- Stage 3
The rhetoric school: the first seniors
You're here when: The high school opens a grade at a time, and the first transcript has to be right.
Transcripts, records and transfers- Transcripts that print weighted and unweighted GPA side by side, Latin included
- Graduation requirements per subject, with every student measured against them
- Transfer credit printed under the school or college that issued it
- A records packet of transcript, attendance and health records for a receiving school, in one print job
- Financial aid: family applications, sliding-scale bands and scholarships
- Staff roles, a time clock and time-off requests
- Stage 4
Established: accreditation and a second campus
You're here when: You graduate a class each May, answer to an accreditor, or open a second campus across town.
How records escrow works- The board pack: enrollment, attendance by grade, receivables and the admissions funnel, printed monthly
- Records escrow: off-site custody of permanent records, with an attestation for your accreditor
- A second campus in the same account, with its own bell schedule, time zone, tuition plans and admissions window
- A dashboard row per campus: students, attendance, admissions and past-due balances
- Staff limited to their own campus, and reports that run per campus or across both
Opening with a preschool room as well? Kindergarten is a promotion, not a migration.
What doesn't change as you grow
One record, first day to graduation
A child's attendance, grades and health history stay on one record. The transcript builds itself from grades posted years before; nobody retypes them.
The same logins
Each parent keeps one login as children move up and siblings arrive. Add a campus and your staff keep theirs.
One price schedule
No plan to upgrade and no module fees. The first 20 students cost $50 a month, and the rate per student steps down as you grow.
Off until you need it
Tell us your kind of school at signup and the parts that kind of school usually skips start switched off: a classical school starts without volunteer check-in, a co-op without admissions. Switch any part on or off in Settings. Switching a part off deletes nothing.
What a month costs at each stage
- Founding class, 60 students
- $150
- Logic school, 100 students
- $250
- First seniors, 150 students
- $350
- Established school, 300 students
- $650
Unlimited staff and family accounts at every size. No setup fee, month to month. If families pay tuition online, a 0.5% platform fee comes out of those payments. Full pricing
Questions from growing schools
We're opening next fall with the grammar school. Isn't this more software than we need?
Only if you have to look at all of it. Choose "classical school" when you sign up and the parts a founding class rarely uses start switched off; turn off anything else in Settings. Up to 20 students costs $50 a month and a school of 60 pays $150, and switching a part off deletes nothing, so the logic school's gradebook and the high school's transcript are there when you grow into them.
What changes on our bill as we grow?
Your subscription changes only with the student count. $50 a month covers your first 20 students; after that each student costs $2.50 up to 100, $2 up to 300, $1.50 up to 600 and $1 beyond. There are no tiers to upgrade, no module fees and no setup fee, and it's month to month. Separately, if families pay tuition online, a 0.5% platform fee comes out of those payments; cash and checks cost nothing.
See the full price scheduleWe're adding a high school. What will we be missing?
Nothing you'd buy separately. Mark a course honors or AP and the transcript prints weighted and unweighted GPA side by side, with a line saying how it was weighted. Write graduation requirements per subject plus a total, and every student is measured against them, including credit earned at a previous school. College courses print as transfer credit under the college that issued them.
Can we open a second campus without a second account?
Yes. Add the campus in Settings. It starts with the school's settings, and you change only what differs: its bell schedule, time zone, tuition plans, admissions window or attendance rules. Staff can be limited to their own campus, and the dashboard gives each campus a row for students, attendance, admissions and past-due balances.
We use something else today. Is moving in hard?
No, and a new head of school who inherited the old system is the usual person asking. Rosters, families, transcripts and gradebooks come in from CSV, and every import shows a preview before anything is written. Ready-made mappings cover exports from FACTS, Gradelink, PowerSchool, QuickSchools, Sycamore, Procare, Brightwheel, Blackbaud and others. It's free and self-serve, and a person answers support@pearspark.com if you get stuck.
When would a school outgrow Pearspark?
When it wants one vendor for tuition management and fundraising, and has a business office to run them. FACTS is built for that and sells it by quote, with implementation and training; Pearspark does no fundraising at all. Need-based aid alone isn't that line: Pearspark takes aid applications and applies sliding-scale awards, and if you want a formal need assessment, a service like Clarity does it and its decisions import here by CSV.
Pearspark vs FACTSStart at the stage you're at
Thirty days free, then month to month. If you ever leave, a full export of your data goes with you, with no exit fee.