San Marcos Unified School District (SMUSD) is one of the top five school districts in San Diego County, with 19 schools, 19,000+ students, and an unwavering commitment to giving every learner the best possible environment to grow. But behind the scenes, the operational systems supporting teachers and administrators were struggling to keep pace with that ambition.
Managing purchasing requests, grants, work based learning, and community partnerships across a district of this scale is no small feat. For years, the team relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets, manual workflows, and email threads to hold it all together. The result was difficult resource allocation, frustrated teachers, and staff spending hours on administrative tasks that could have gone toward supporting students.
That changed when SMUSD partnered with Elevation Solutions to reimagine its operations on Salesforce.
The Challenge: Disconnected Systems, Frustrated Teachers
Purchasing Difficulties
SMUSD’s Career Technical Education (CTE) program had over 40 teachers independently building purchase request spreadsheets throughout the year. Each teacher tracked their own wish lists, with no standardized way to communicate needs, assign priorities, or track approval status. The process was slow, with approvals taking up to a full month, and it was inequitable.
Without a centralized view of spending, there was no way to compare requests across departments or make data-informed decisions. That made equitable choices difficult.
Teachers also felt disconnected from the process. Once a request was submitted, it disappeared into a black box. There were no status updates and no sense that the district was truly listening to what they needed.
Grant Management: A Manual Marathon
SMUSD manages many large grants, each tracked through its own spreadsheet and process. Managing grant funds and burn down was labor-intensive, pulling staff away from higher-value work. There was no consolidated dashboard for tracking disbursements, allocations, or remaining balances, just a collection of disconnected files and fragmented institutional knowledge.
Partners Tracked Through Email
CTE’s partner relationships, the local businesses, industry professionals, and organizations who provide students with internships, guest speakers, and facility tours, were managed almost entirely through email by teachers. When a teacher left the district, those relationships left with them. There was no system to track engagement, manage affiliation agreements, or give teachers a reliable way to invite partners into the program.
The Solution: A Unified Platform
Elevation Solutions designed and implemented a Salesforce solution covering three core areas: Purchase Request Management, Grants Management, and WBL and Partner Management, all connected to SMUSD’s existing SIS (Synergy) and finance system (PeopleSoft).
Streamlined Purchase Requests from Submission to Delivery
The new system created a clear, end-to-end workflow for CTE purchase requests. A teacher submits a purchase request directly in Salesforce. The CTE team reviews and approves it. Accounting staff then create a requisition in PeopleSoft, triggered from the Salesforce record, and the Requisition ID is automatically populated back onto the case. As the requisition moves through PeopleSoft (approved, PO dispatched, received at warehouse, completed), status updates flow back to Salesforce automatically, and the teacher receives notifications every step of the way.
Teachers no longer need to maintain spreadsheets and have direct access to status. This has reduced the burden on the purchasing team to keep teachers apprised of when their request is fulfilled.
Grants Managed from One Dashboard
All of SMUSD’s awarded grant funding is managed in a single Salesforce environment, giving district leaders a comprehensive, real-time view of the grant portfolio. The platform tracks award amounts, funding allocations, remaining balances, and financial activity throughout the life of each grant. What once required hours of manual compilation now lives in a dashboard that gives administrators an immediate, accurate picture of every grant at once.
Partners and WBL Brought into the Fold
Corporate partners are now managed through a structured Salesforce workflow. The process starts when a CTE teacher adds a partner into the system as a lead. Partners complete digital affiliation agreements through DocuSign, integrated with Salesforce. Once approved, partners are converted to accounts and invited to a dedicated Partner Portal, where their engagement activities are tracked and attributed to specific course offerings. Work Based Learning pathways and terms are tracked, with the ability to connect students and faculty to organizations.
The Partner Portal is built on Salesforce Experience Cloud and lets partners communicate with teachers, view signed affiliation agreements, sign guardian permission forms for their interns, and provide required feedback on those interns.
The Results: Measurable Impact for Teachers, Administrators, and Students
The transformation has been significant, both in efficiency gains and in the human impact on teachers and staff.
Purchasing is faster and fairer. Approval time dropped from one month to as little as three days, with high-priority requests approved in as little as 24 hours. Teachers can see exactly where their requests stand at any moment. Administrators can now view spending across every teacher and team side by side, giving them the data to make equitable, informed decisions about resource allocation. It gives SMUSD the leverage to course-correct and ensure every classroom gets what it needs.
Grant reporting saves 8 hours per week. What once required manually pulling data from multiple spreadsheets now lives in a single dashboard. Administrators can approve grant funding with a single click, without tracking down and re-entering information. One system, full visibility.
Teacher confidence is up. Perhaps the most meaningful outcome isn’t measured in hours or dollars. Teachers now feel heard. Now they add items as needs come up during the year instead of scrambling at month-end, and they can mark what’s urgent versus what can wait. When a request gets approved in days and they can see exactly where it stands, it tells them the district is listening.
Forty teacher spreadsheets are gone, every grant lives in one dashboard and partner relationships are finally captured in a system that outlasts any one teacher.
A Foundation for What’s Next
San Marcos Unified School District now has the operational infrastructure to match its educational ambitions. By replacing disconnected manual processes with a unified Salesforce platform, SMUSD has shifted its staff’s time away from administrative busywork and back toward students.
The system Elevation Solutions built handles SMUSD’s needs today, and it’s set up to grow with the district as those needs change.
Build the operational backbone your district deserves
If your team is holding district operations together with spreadsheets and email threads, there’s a better way. We help K-12 districts replace manual processes with Salesforce systems built for how schools actually work. To talk through what that could look like for your district, reach us at booking@elevation.solutions or fill out the form below.
