Aspen Academy: Letting Data Tell the Story
At Aspen Academy, eighth graders don’t give book reports. They pitch the sharks.
Every May, the independent school in Greenwood Village, Colorado, lets its eighth-grade class take on a real business idea, a real presentation, and a real panel. It’s the culmination of 11 years of entrepreneurship and leadership lessons that start in preschool. And behind every pitch deck that loads on the first try is Chris Holtzem, Director of IT, who manages the school’s devices, network, and data.
He approaches the job the way Aspen approaches everything else: With numbers. Every day starts in his dashboards, which track everything from network uptime to loaner devices. Today, Aspen uses GoGuardian Admin, Teacher, Beacon, and Hall Pass to manage web access, support teachers, help identify students who may need support, and manage hall passes.
The challenge
Before GoGuardian Admin added screen time reporting to its dashboard, Holtzem built reports manually to compare students’ web activity during and outside school hours. He pulled data monthly to track how much time students spent online on sites like YouTube and social media, then separated what happened at school from what happened at home.
“It would take me a couple of hours to gather everything I needed to help tell the story,” he said. Eventually, it was just too much. "The data just became so massive that I couldn't pull it anymore."
Educators were losing time, too. Aspen staff understood the need for classroom technology, but keeping students focused was hard. "The problem is that kids are a lot sneakier than teachers," Holtzem explained. Even directing learners to the right website took up precious time before the school adopted GoGuardian Teacher. "I can't tell you how much instructional time I wasted trying to be like, 'No, no, no. This is the link. No, no, no, here.’" According to him, an older tool they tried for sending links "would randomly only work for maybe a third or half of the computers."
Out in the hallways, Aspen’s pass system ran on trust. “That’s how we functioned before, which is great, especially in a school where we’re teaching leadership,” Holtzem noted.
But trust left gaps. Without a consistent record of who was out of class and when, staff had no easy way to piece things together when something went wrong, like vandalism in a bathroom. Each incident meant staff spent time they didn’t have trying to figure out who was involved. Going back to paper passes wasn’t the answer either. “Nobody wants to take the time to fill those out when they’re in the middle of teaching,” Holtzem said.
The advent of AI raised yet another problem. For two to three years, Aspen's leaders debated whether students should be allowed to use AI in their business plans and other work. Holtzem kept saying no. "There is no AI that exists out there right now that we can actively monitor and manage to ensure student safety, and I'm just not okay with that."
The plan
Aspen tackled those problems one at a time, starting with how students access the internet. The school ties GoGuardian Admin to its Google organizational units (OUs). Each grade level has its own OU, and there are separate "timeout" OUs for students who have lost internet privileges. That setup lets Holtzem set different policies for each group.
"That's just the easiest way for us to decide who is allowed to do what since a blanket allowance wouldn’t work for the whole school," he explained.
GoGuardian Admin’s recommendation engine has reduced manual work. “The new suggestions have been incredibly helpful," Holtzem said. "I used to monitor really closely and try to nitpick every little thing that I wanted to block or not block, and now I don’t have to.”
When a unit calls for content that's normally blocked, such as an event in US History class due to its violent nature, Holtzem can open access and close it again when the unit ends. "It's really simple to be able to do those things even at a moment's notice," he explained. "And then it's easy to flip them back over." Teachers also give the IT team a heads-up before lessons that could trigger GoGuardian Beacon alerts, such as a Revolutionary War unit that has students searching for weaponry.
When Aspen first heard about GoGuardian Hall Pass, the school's leaders had just met about a bathroom problem. "We needed to come up with a solution pretty quickly because what we were doing before wasn’t working anymore," Holtzem said. The feature that sold him was the ability to set rules for which students can be out of class at the same time.
"I said, 'Stop. That's what I want. I need that right now.'" Holtzem took GoGuardian Hall Pass straight to Aspen's middle school director and said he’d found the solution they were looking for. Aspen joined the beta and rolled it out in stages. The school started with seventh and eighth grade, added sixth grade near the end of the year, and now uses Hall Pass in fourth through eighth grade.
The impact
The reporting Holtzem used to build by hand is now all in one place on GoGuardian Admin’s dashboard. Questions that used to take hours to answer now require only a quick search. "I can just say, 'Let's see. Seventh grade is spending this much time on their devices at home vs. at school..'"
By comparing GoGuardian screen time and Hall Pass reports with the school’s academic records, staff can spot patterns and identify students who may need support. "We can now say with confidence, 'Hey, this kid is in the bathroom 12 times a day, and they also have a lower grade than 90% of their class. I wonder what that means.’”
GoGuardian Hall Pass has changed student behavior, even though learners don't always know how much staff can see. "It's an obvious accountability piece," Holtzem noted. "I can see [the alert] pop up, and then 12 seconds later that kid walks through and I'm like, 'Yep, there we go.'" iPads mounted next to classroom doors extend that accountability to the whole class. "Not just the teacher, but everybody in the class knows that student is supposed to be back by now or knows where they are."
Aspen's dean of students now uses the data to limit passes for some students and keep certain ones from being out together, "because that's when problems happen," Holtzem said. When he showed her the dashboards that track how much time each student spends out of class per day and per week, her reaction was, "This is bananas."
GoGuardian Admin’s Prompt Visibility gave Holtzem access to captured text conversations on supported browser-based AI platforms, reopening the school’s AI discussion. "I could go in and see the full conversation across all of the different AI chatbots,'" Holtzem explained. "I called everyone back and said, 'We can have a different discussion about AI use now.'"
He can now plan for AI use on Aspen's terms. "For example, we can say, ‘Mondays from 8 am to 9 am is our time that we're going to have AI open to us and we're going to use it.' Thanks to GoGuardian, I can do that."
Confidence to keep learning on devices
Asked what would break if GoGuardian disappeared tomorrow, Holtzem stated, "I don't know what wouldn't break."
Aspen relies on the GoGuardian suite for visibility into student web activity and alerts about activity that may signal self-harm, suicide risk, or potential harm to others. Without it, Holtzem believes the school would have to shut down devices for a while. “I feel like we'd have to go back to paper and pencil because we feel so comfortable knowing we have [GoGuardian]; if it went away, we wouldn’t have that confidence."