Skip to main content

Education

Student and faculty service delivery for education

Kinetic gives school districts and universities one place for students and staff to request services and see their status, across the SIS, ERP, HR and IT systems you already run. Fairfax County Public Schools handles about 250,000 requests a year this way across more than 200 schools and facilities.

Book a working session Read the FCPS case study

Fairfax County Public Schools Fulfillment time cut in half, with fulfillment teams still working in the district's BMC Remedy service desk.

Fairfax County Public Schools service delivery before and after Kinetic
Measure Before With Kinetic
How staff asked for help Phone, email or a paper form, depending on the school One request portal for every school
Approvals Days in an administrator's inbox Minutes, routed by request type and cost
Device distribution About 2 weeks About 3 days
Fulfillment time Baseline Cut in half
Figures from the published Fairfax County Public Schools case study.

Students and faculty deal with the institution one office at a time

A student who wants to withdraw from a course after the deadline needs the instructor, an advisor and the registrar to agree, and sometimes financial aid too. On most campuses that means a PDF, four email threads and a week of silence.

Every one of those offices has a good system. The SIS holds enrollment, the ERP holds money, HR holds people. None of them was built to carry a request from one office to the next, so staff carry it by hand.

K-12 districts feel the same gap at a different scale. At FCPS, before Kinetic, one school phoned the help desk, another sent paper forms and a third used email, and central IT could not see which locations were behind.

Students
Carry a PDF petition from the instructor to the advisor to the registrar, then wait to learn whether a hold was placed.
Faculty and adjuncts
Start the term without a Canvas shell, a network account or a parking permit because each sits with a different office.
Registrar and student services
Re-key decisions into the SIS and answer the same status question at the counter and again by email.
Central IT
Owns the ticket queue but sees only the part of each request that reached it.

Flagship use case

A late withdrawal petition, start to finish

The student asks once. Kinetic checks the SIS and financial aid, sends the petition to each approver in order and posts the result back to the student record. Nobody forwards a PDF.

Example design for a university. Not a named customer deployment.

  1. Step 1 Experience layer

    The student files one petition

    Signed in with their campus account, the student picks the course from a list the SIS already filled in, gives a reason and attaches documentation.

  2. Step 2 Workflow layer

    AI reads the request

    AI sorts the petition by type, summarizes the reason for reviewers and flags a missing attachment before anyone opens it.

    AI step

  3. Step 3 Integration layer

    Kinetic checks enrollment and aid

    It confirms the enrollment in the SIS and asks the financial aid system whether dropping the course changes the student's aid status.

  4. Step 4 Workflow layer

    Each approver signs off in turn

    Instructor, then advisor, then registrar, each from their own queue. Financial aid is added to the chain only when the withdrawal affects aid.

    People approve

  5. Step 5 Integration layer

    The SIS is updated

    The approved withdrawal is posted to the student record, and the bursar's office gets a task if tuition changes.

  6. Step 6 Experience layer

    The student sees the outcome

    Every approval shows in the portal as it happens. The advisor sees the same history the next time the student books an appointment.

Where AI stops. AI sorts and summarizes. It does not grant a withdrawal or touch the student record, and a person with the authority to decide makes every academic decision.

Customer result

How Fairfax County Public Schools standardized requests across 200+ locations

FCPS is one of the largest school districts in the country. Replacing BMC Remedy mid-year, and retraining staff at every school, was not an option. Kinetic put one request portal in front of it instead, with forms that change by role, school and request type and approvals that route by cost.

Fulfillment teams kept working in Remedy. Device distribution dropped from about two weeks to about three days.

Read the FCPS case study
Requests a year
250,000
Fulfillment time
50% faster
Approvals
Days to minutes
Service catalog
Doubled
with no added fulfillment staff

Other requests schools and campuses move onto the same portal

  • A service catalog for every school

    The FCPS pattern: one place to request devices and repairs, routed to the team that fulfills it.

    IT service catalog

  • Faculty and staff onboarding

    Accounts and LMS access ready from the HR hire record, before the first class.

    Employee onboarding

  • Student and staff devices

    Laptop requests and repairs tracked against the asset record, with the school's approver in the loop.

    Device lifecycle management

  • Petitions and paper forms

    Grade appeals and residency changes rebuilt as connected forms that route themselves.

    Form automation

  • Facilities and maintenance

    Work orders for classrooms and residence halls, with the room already on the request.

    Facilities management

The systems it connects, and where it runs

Kinetic connects to the systems below through their APIs, including systems hosted on campus. If a system publishes an OpenAPI spec, Kinetic can connect to it. Nothing is migrated.

  • Banner, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions or Workday Student
  • PowerSchool and other K-12 SIS
  • Canvas and other LMS
  • Finance and ERP
  • HR and payroll
  • Financial aid
  • BMC Remedy, ServiceNow and other ITSM
  • Identity and directory
Campus sign-in
Campus sign-in works over SAML or OIDC, so everyone uses the account they already have.
Hosted or on your own servers
Use Kinetic as a cloud service we host, or run it on your own servers.
Student privacy
Records stay in the SIS. Access follows role, and every request keeps a history of who acted on it. Your privacy office decides how that maps to FERPA.

What you can build next

Once the first request type runs, the portal and the SIS connection are already in place. The next process starts from there.

Frequently asked questions

Answered by Kinetic Data. Last updated .

  • Is this for K-12 or higher education?

    Both. Our published education result is from Fairfax County Public Schools, a K-12 district. The petition flow on this page is an example design for a college or university, not a named customer deployment.

  • Does Kinetic replace our SIS?

    No. Your SIS, whether that is Banner or PowerSchool, stays the student record. Kinetic reads from and writes to it, and adds the portal and the approval steps that today run on PDFs and email.

  • Can students and staff sign in with their campus account?

    Yes. Kinetic supports single sign-on through SAML and OIDC, so your existing identity provider, such as Entra ID or Okta, handles sign-in. Nobody gets a separate Kinetic password.

  • How does Kinetic handle student records and FERPA?

    Student records stay in your SIS. Kinetic shows each person only the requests their role allows and keeps a history of who approved or changed each one. Software cannot be FERPA certified, so your privacy office reviews those controls against your own policies.

  • Where does AI help, and who decides?

    AI sorts requests and summarizes petitions. People make every academic decision. Kinetic does not ship its own model; you choose one, such as Claude, Azure OpenAI or a model you host.

  • Where do districts and universities usually start?

    Usually with the IT or device request process, because the volume is high and the pain is visible. FCPS started there and later doubled its service catalog.

Map one student or staff process with us

In a free two-hour working session we take one process, such as late withdrawals or adjunct onboarding, trace it across your SIS, HR and IT systems, and hand you a written plan for building it on Kinetic.

Book a working session