District rolls out Securly and EduCLIMBER; county thanks staff for Frontline CAERP payroll implementation

San Mateo County Office of Education officials thanked Millbrae City School District staff for their role in implementing the countywide Frontline CAERP payroll and finance system, and district leaders reported two other districtwide technology systems are now live.

"We think that this implementation is pretty successful because we haven't really received any calls about your payroll being wrong," said Dania Ooni, executive director of district business services at the San Mateo County Office of Education, who credited Millbrae staff and listed several district employees by name. Ooni told trustees SMCOE paid about $15.6 million toward implementation costs for the countywide project, including parallel system maintenance, consulting and overtime to support districts.

Superintendent Hickey reported that Securly, a classroom-management and web-monitoring tool for Chromebooks, is now live at all schools. District staff started training at Taylor Middle School and extended training to elementary teachers; Jeff Horn led optional elementary training on Oct. 1. Hickey described Securly features that teachers are using: real-time screen views, a push-link function that opens the same web page on every student Chromebook, screen locking during announcements, teacher-screen sharing, teacher-to-student chat and an AI-guided chat filter for students.

Hickey said teachers have found features such as locking student screens during announcements and pushing a single link to all devices save instructional time and reduce off-task behavior. "If you look at the larger picture, this is what a teacher would see on their screen," Hickey said while describing Securly's teacher toolbar.

Hickey also reported EduCLIMBER, the district’s student-data platform, is live and staff have been trained (Taylor Middle School training on Sept. 24 and elementary site training on Oct. 1). Catherine Welslive and Jeff Horn were credited for the rollout. Hickey said EduCLIMBER now gives teachers instant access to attendance, EL status and assessment data; staff worked with the EduCLIMBER engineers to add a hover-over legend for DIBELS composite scores so teachers can interpret raw scores without consulting a separate correlation chart.

District leaders said both systems enter a continuous-improvement phase; no policy changes or budget votes tied to the rollouts were taken at the meeting.