Aura Preschool Connect
A role-based app built for a real preschool (anonymized as Aura Preschool), replacing a fragmented, manual communication stack with one place parents, teachers, and admins actually check.
Where it started
This didn't start as a hypothetical brief. I'm a parent at this school, and the gaps below are ones I ran into myself before I ever framed them as a design problem.
A notice handed over a week early, with nowhere to resurface
Circulars were printed and sent home with kids — often a full week before the event or dress-code day they referred to. A notice handed over that early, with no reminder anywhere closer to the date, is easy to forget by the time it actually matters.
Once that paper was out of sight, it was effectively out of the system — no second surface where it resurfaced, no reminder, nothing to check back against.
Parent feed with a persistent notice at the top of the stream.
Four channels, none of them complete
Information wasn't missing — it was scattered across four channels that never talked to each other, and no single one carried every update a parent needed.
Gmail
Meal planners, monthly learning calendars, event notices. Parents don't check school mail the way they check WhatsApp — it competes with everything else in the inbox and gets routinely missed.
Printed circulars
Notices and feedback forms, sent home on paper — easy to lose, easy to forget, no digital trace.
The monthly newsletter, broadcast manually by the admin, plus leave and urgent notices typed and sent one at a time.
Class photographs — visible only to parents who use Facebook, which structurally excludes any parent who doesn't.
The common thread
None of these was a single catastrophic failure. It was compounding friction: four channels no parent could reliably monitor, notices timed to be forgotten, and feedback forms that went home on paper, came back on paper, and sat until someone manually retyped every response before a report could even start.
What I built
A gallery every parent can actually see
Class photos moved off Facebook entirely and into the app itself — open to every parent regardless of which platforms they use, closing the exact gap that excluded some families before.
Teacher class gallery — upload, filter by class and tag.
A meal planner that doesn't rely on Gmail
Automated and surfaced directly in the parent view — no more monthly PDF buried in an inbox competing with everything else a parent gets mailed.
Meal planner, opening on today's menu.
A newsletter that lives where parents already are
Published directly in-app instead of a WhatsApp broadcast typed out by hand each month — the admin publishes once, every parent sees it in the same place.
Newsletter opens as a PDF inside the app, not a separate download.
RSVP that doesn't require a reply-all thread
Events get a one-tap "attending" instead of a reply buried in an email chain or a verbal confirmation the school has to track by hand.
Event notice with a one-tap attend / can't go RSVP.
Where it stands
I demoed the working product to school leadership — not a slide deck, the actual app, running. They liked what they saw. I shared the RFP, and the proposal is now under consideration. I ran the entire project solo: research, design, build, and this pitch.