Alignment Platform · North Star · Tier 02
Calm daily operations for schools that have outgrown improvised systems.
North Star is the operational infrastructure of the school—student records, attendance, family communication, and the daily systems that make a Montessori school run without crisis management.
Tier 02
The layer that keeps the school running.
North Star handles the operational infrastructure of the Montessori school—student records, attendance, family communication, and daily systems. The layer that protects the work inside the classroom by ensuring everything around it functions reliably. Not as glamorous as curriculum. Not as visible as the prepared environment. But the reason guides can focus on children instead of paperwork.
The design principle
“A prepared environment requires a prepared institution. North Star builds the institutional preparation that makes Montessori practice possible at scale.”
Who It's For
For administrators who need operational clarity without an operations team.
North Star is built for school administrators, registrars, and operations leads who are managing student records, attendance systems, compliance requirements, and family communication with tools that weren't designed for Montessori. It integrates directly with Surveyor—so classroom data and school records are one system, not two.
- —School administrators managing student records and compliance
- —Operations leads coordinating daily systems across programs
- —Registrars managing enrollment and communication workflows
- —Heads of school who need school-level visibility without drowning in data entry
- —Growing schools that have outgrown spreadsheet-based operations
Core Features
What you can do inside North Star.
SIS & Student Profiles
Complete student information system with full profiles connected to classroom documentation from Surveyor. One record across the school's life cycle, from enrollment to alumni. No duplication, no data migration.
Attendance
Daily, QR code, morning check-in, and attendance monitoring, designed for Montessori daily rhythms and multi-age groupings. Daily roster always current. No separate attendance system.
Multilingual Family Portal
A dedicated portal for families with full language switching. Families access their children's records, tuition, communication, and school community in their home language. Not a translation overlay. Language switching built into the design.
Messaging, Newsletters & Digests
Direct messaging, structured school-wide newsletters, and automated digests, all in one system with full student context. Families receive organized updates. Staff are not rebuilding information from multiple sources.
Before & After Care
Full extended day management: sign-in and sign-out, kiosk mode for drop-off, program registration, drop-in care, and charges connected directly to family billing. One system for extended day.
Safety & Health Log
Health incident documentation, medication tracking, and safety log for each student. Connected to student profiles and accessible to authorized staff. Meets compliance requirements without a separate health management system.
Portal Signing & Field Trips
Built-in electronic signatures for enrollment agreements, field trip permission slips, and HR acknowledgements. E-SIGN / UETA compliant with SHA-256 document hashing, server-verified audit trail, and one-click Certificate of Completion. No DocuSign account, no per-envelope fees. Field trip module included: roster, permissions, and signed slips live inside the student record.
Handbooks that stay alive
Most handbooks are PDFs that go stale the moment they are posted. MMAP treats your handbooks like working documents. Edit any section inline, reorder sections without rebuilding the whole file, add new policies as your school grows, and publish to staff in one click. Every publish is a new version — v1, v2, v3 stay in your version history forever, with the change note from the admin who published it ("Updated late-pickup fee," "New phone policy after the September incident") and a list of which staff acknowledged that exact version. When you require re-acknowledgment, staff get an email and an in-app alert pointing them to the new version. They sign once, the signature ties to that specific version with timestamp and IP, and your compliance dashboard shows you who is caught up at a glance. Built-in templates: Family Handbook (19 sections), Staff Handbook (12 sections). Both fully editable. Add as many additional policy documents as your school needs.
Compliance Hub
State reporting, licensing documentation, and compliance workflows that surface what is needed and when, without requiring a dedicated compliance staff member.
Intervention & Discipline Tracking
Document behavioral concerns, interventions, and restorative conversations in a structured system connected to student records. Patterns are visible, not buried in email threads.
School Configuration, Integrations & Global Search
User management, school config, bulk import and export, third-party integrations, and global search across all records. The operational infrastructure that keeps a growing school running.
Events & Volunteer Sign-ups
Run school events without a separate sign-up service. Create categorized volunteer slots with capacity, parents self-serve from the family portal, and admins see who is committed at a glance. No SignUpGenius, no spreadsheets, no double-bookings.
Public iCal Calendar Feed
Families subscribe to the school calendar from Apple, Google, or Outlook with one link. Events stay current automatically—no manual re-syncing, no missed updates. Each classroom can publish its own feed too, so families with multiple children pick the streams they need.
Per-Classroom Calendar Filter
Parents with children in more than one classroom toggle which classrooms they're viewing. The school-wide calendar stays underneath; the noise drops away. Built for families navigating multi-age and sibling-across-classrooms life.
Parent-to-Parent Direct Messaging
Parents reach each other inside the family portal—coordinated carpools, playdate logistics, classroom volunteers—without scattering across personal phone numbers. Parent identity labels show "Maya's mom" alongside the name so families know who they're talking to. School admin retains visibility for safety.
Brand Kit & Co-Branding
Upload your logo, colors, and typography once; they cascade to every staff and parent surface—portal, emails, newsletters, exports. Background-aware logo upload sniffs for stale white edges and offers a one-click in-browser fix. Parent-facing surfaces show your school logo with a discreet "Powered by MMAP" footer in the Stripe pattern.
In Practice
An operations day with North Star.
The registrar opens North Star on Monday morning and sees the week's attendance concerns flagged from last week—two students with patterns worth noting, already linked to their classroom records in Surveyor. She sends a family update to three families with one action, the message contextualized by the child's full record. The head of school checks the school dashboard before a board check-in—enrollment trends, compliance status, communication health—clear, organized, and in one place. No spreadsheets pulled. No emails dug through. The school runs, and people can see it running.
No duplicate records
Classroom and school data flow as one
No separate communication tool
Family messages connected to the full student context
No compliance guesswork
What's needed surfaces when it's needed
Next in the Pathway
North Star connects directly to Mapmaker.
When a school activates Mapmaker, student records, admissions, and operations data become part of a full organizational system. Staffing, adult culture, and institutional coordination sit in the same environment as classroom and school operations. The school becomes one coherent institution—not a classroom layer and an admin layer running separately.
Mapmaker · Tier 03
Admissions, staffing, adult culture, and organizational coordination. The organizational layer that builds on North Star.
Explore Mapmaker →Ready to See North Star?
Request a walkthrough of North Star.
We'll walk through daily operations, student records, and family communication tools in the context of your school's current administrative setup.
MMAP · Built for schools