The American School in Japan, widely known as ASIJ, is a private, non-profit international school located in Tokyo. Founded in 1902, ASIJ offers an American-style education to students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. With a student body representing more than 60 nationalities and a total enrollment of 1,700 students across four schools, including early learning, elementary, middle, and high school, the institution has both the scale and the diversity that demand a serious, reliable international school LMS built for complexity.
By 2016, ASIJ had reached a turning point. Its legacy systems were not just outdated. They were actively getting in the way of teaching, learning, and family communication. The school made a decision to modernize, and the technology it selected transformed how its educators work and how families stay connected to their children’s academic lives.
The challenge: a fragmented digital environment
Before ASIJ implemented its new systems, the situation on the ground was difficult. The school’s previous student information system (SIS) was so old that administrators needed to install a terminal emulator simply to use it. Teachers had no ability to look up parent contact information on their own. Accessing a parent’s email address meant asking the administrative office directly.
The learning management system (LMS) presented even greater problems. It had no gradebook functionality at all. Instead, it served purely as a document repository, with folders full of PDFs. Teachers were forced to rely on a separate, standalone electronic gradebook to record and share grades. This separation created one of the most consistent complaints in student satisfaction surveys: students had no visibility into how their grades were being calculated. They could see scores but could not understand the logic behind them.
The absence of student photos in the LMS meant that teachers, particularly those new to a class, had difficulty connecting names to faces. Without a calendar function, students had to cross-reference a separate schedule document or build their own calendar to know where they needed to be and when. The result was a student experience that was fragmented, confusing, and entirely inconsistent from class to class.
Warren Apel, ASIJ Director of Technology, captured the situation plainly:
We had a hodgepodge of solutions. Everyone was on their own. Every student had a completely unique experience in every class. Most students had 8 different electronic destinations to go to.
What ASIJ was looking for in a new system
ASIJ’s leadership team approached the review process with a clear set of priorities. They were not simply shopping for a technology upgrade. They wanted a system that would fundamentally change how learning was documented, shared, and communicated. The requirements they brought to the process reflected both pedagogical ambitions and practical operational needs.
Among the specific capabilities the school sought were the following:
- A gradebook that could support a move away from calculated percentage averages toward standards-based grading, with effective qualitative feedback for students
- The ability to share student academic progress across teams, so that teachers, counselors, and administrators could understand how students were performing across all of their classes
- A way for teachers to privately document and share observations about students’ social-emotional needs and challenges
- Quick teacher access to important emergency information such as medical notes, allergy details, and home contact information
- Analytic reports that would allow counselors and administrators to use data to inform decisions about programs, instruction, and student progress
ASIJ reviewed more than a dozen platforms before narrowing its selection to two finalists. The deciding factor was not a checklist comparison. It was teacher feedback. Focus groups and surveys conducted with educators strongly preferred one option over the other. Apel described the outcome in a memo to school leadership announcing the selection:
When we demonstrated both systems to teachers and school leaders, they were far more impressed with the Edsby interface and with the additional features and options Edsby provided.
Why Edsby stood apart as an LMS for international schools
For ASIJ, the appeal of Edsby went beyond the gradebook. The school had committed to moving away from averaging and point-based grades toward a more qualitative, standards-based approach. This was a pedagogical shift, and finding an LMS for international schools with the flexibility to support it was not straightforward. Most platforms offered only two choices: IB-style grades or traditional American letter grades with percentage averages. Neither fit what ASIJ was trying to achieve. Apel explained the challenge:
We knew we wanted to move away from averaging and point-based grades. Most LMSes only offered the choice of either IB-style grades or traditional American letter grades, percentage scores, and averages. Edsby checked all the boxes as far as giving teachers access to info and a gradebook that can do qualitative standards-based feedback. The fact it also had calendaring and messaging was even better.
The memo Apel wrote to leadership also noted something broader. Edsby was not just a better LMS. It solved problems that went beyond the classroom:
Edsby is much more than a simple LMS replacement and solves other problems we have, such as making information more accessible, making office tasks more efficient, and helping to overcome connectedness issues behind our low student belonging survey results.
This framing matters. ASIJ was not solving a narrow technology problem. The school was addressing a broader question about how students experience learning and how connected they feel to the institution. Edsby’s combination of gradebook, calendaring, messaging, and social features made it possible to address several of those questions with one platform.
How Edsby changed everyday life at ASIJ
Once implemented, Edsby became woven into the daily routines of students, teachers, and families alike. Teachers began using a journal feature within their Edsby classes to share information and updates. The standards-based gradebook started delivering feedback to students and parents in real time, replacing the opaque system that had frustrated students for years. Teachers could now see student photos within Edsby, which helped them learn new faces more quickly and manage seating arrangements more effectively. Progress report and visibility into certain info continue to be honed.
The platform also became the home for extracurricular life at the school. Teams and clubs received their own Edsby groups, giving students spaces for social interaction, schedule management, and file sharing that were organized and accessible in one place. Perhaps most practically, everyone in the ASIJ community, students, parents, and teachers alike, could now see the day’s schedule directly in Edsby. They no longer needed to cross-reference separate documents to know where they should be and when.
For families, the change was particularly significant. Parents who had previously received grades without context could now see what specific feedback their child had received. The communication between school and home became more transparent, more timely, and more useful and continues to receive enhancements.
Adding Veracross: two systems working as one
A year after Edsby was established, in 2018, ASIJ made another significant change and transitioned its student information system to Veracross. Given how foundational Edsby had already become, a SIS migration could have been a disruptive experience for families and educators. But students and parents already using Edsby barely noticed the change, because Edsby’s automatic roster system was able to pull data from the new SIS with minimal disruption to the user experience.
ASIJ was actually the first school to use both Veracross and Edsby together. That meant some integration investment was required at the outset, and periodically over time as the connection between Veracross and Edsby matured. Apel described the process:
There was some work to do in creating the data synchronization, but now it’s working very well. We’re super excited about what the future holds.
Today, ASIJ uses Veracross to manage its complex eight-day rotating schedule, record health center visits, and document details such as a student’s learning support status. The Veracross email list feature allows teachers to send messages to all parents in a class by emailing a class alias through their standard email client. Teachers also use a Veracross feature that helps them associate students’ faces with their names through a memorization game. Together, Edsby and Veracross have become the backbone of teaching and learning infrastructure in ASIJ’s middle and high schools.
The analytics advantage
One of the most valued aspects of Edsby for ASIJ’s leadership has been its analytics capabilities. For a school committed to understanding student achievement in a standards-based context, having a clear and usable view of performance data is essential. Apel’s assessment was direct:
There are things we still want to see, but we absolutely love Edsby’s analytics. It’s one of the best interfaces for understanding student achievement in a standards-based environment that I’ve ever seen. Its heat map is beautiful.
This kind of analytic visibility supports not only instructional decisions but also counseling and administrative planning. When counselors and administrators can see how students are performing across classes in real time, they can identify students who need support before a problem becomes a crisis. The research consistently supports this kind of data-driven approach to student support, as documented in studies on the relationship between early intervention and academic outcomes. One relevant resource for understanding the broader context of school data use can be found at this peer-reviewed overview:
Measurable cost savings
The impact of ASIJ’s technology transformation is not only visible in the quality of teaching and family engagement. It is also reflected in the school’s budget. Since adopting Edsby in 2017, ASIJ has saved $60,000 USD every year compared to the cost of its previous system. Over the years since implementation, that represents a substantial return on a technology investment that has also delivered broad improvements in the student experience, teacher effectiveness, and family communication.
These savings have come alongside a genuine qualitative improvement in how the school operates. That combination, of lower cost and higher quality, is precisely what makes the ASIJ case study worth examining for any school leader thinking about how to modernize their digital infrastructure without simply adding to an already fragmented landscape of tools.
What other schools can learn from ASIJ
The ASIJ experience illustrates several principles that translate well beyond a single international school in Tokyo. First, teacher input matters enormously in platform selection. ASIJ’s decision to run focus groups and surveys with educators before choosing a system meant that the platform they selected had genuine buy-in from the people who would use it every day. That buy-in is a precondition for successful adoption.
Second, the value of consolidation cannot be overstated. ASIJ moved from a world where students had eight separate electronic destinations to a world anchored by one integrated platform. The reduction in cognitive load for students and families was immediate and meaningful. When information lives in one place, people actually use it.
Third, the SIS integration story demonstrates that transitions do not have to be painful. With the right global school software architecture, a school can change its student information system without disrupting the experience of the families and students who depend on daily access to school data. That kind of resilience is increasingly important as schools navigate changing technology landscapes.
Finally, the cost savings story is a reminder that investing in the right K12 platform worldwide does not have to mean higher spending. The ASIJ case proves that a well-chosen, unified system can deliver genuine financial efficiency while improving the quality of teaching, communication, and student support across the board.
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