It is just after midnight on February 2nd. In the quiet neighborhoods that fan out below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, something unusual is happening. Parents are awake. They are not watching the news or scrolling their phones out of habit. They are sitting at laptops, fingers hovering, staring at an enrollment portal that will not open until 12:01 a.m.
The irony, as Mike Babcock is quick to point out, is delicious. “It’s not first-come, first-served,” he says with a laugh. “We have a lottery system. But they’re there at midnight anyway.”
Babcock is the Instructional Technology Coordinator for Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 which, depending on how you count, also makes him the de facto web director, digital strategist, communications lead, and part-time mountain bike coach. In a district with no dedicated communications staff, he is, in the most affectionate sense, the whole department.
And somehow, improbably, it works. Beautifully.
“Every interaction we’ve had with Apptegy I don’t know how they hire people, but they hire quality folks. I’ve never had a bad experience.”
Nestled against one of Colorado’s most iconic skylines, Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 carries the kind of reputation that most districts spend decades chasing. It is rated the number one school district in the state. Ninety percent of its graduates go on to two or four-year colleges. Its single high school offers 32 Advanced Placement courses, and many students graduate holding more than thirty college credits, the equivalent of a full year of tuition, on the house.
But rankings and statistics only tell part of the story. What defines Cheyenne Mountain is something harder to quantify: a sense of belonging that outlasts graduation. Employees who were once students in these same halls. A superintendent who rides mountain bikes with the team he oversees. Families who drive across the city without busing, without complaint, because they simply do not want their children anywhere else.
“A lot of our families stick around,” Babcock says. “We have many employees who were former students. It’s a very close-knit type of community. People come here and never leave.” He pauses. “I came from Jersey, and I never left either.”
When Telling Your Story Is Not Optional
For years, the district’s website did what most school websites do: it announced things. Dates. Calendars. The occasional PDF. It was, as Babcock describes it, a digital billboard static, functional, and entirely forgettable.
When a new superintendent arrived from a larger district, he came with a different vision. He had seen what a modern communication platform could do. He knew that a school district’s story does not tell itself, and that in a competitive educational landscape even for a district with a waitlist perception and narrative matter enormously.
“He wanted something that was more than just a digital billboard,” Babcock recalls. “He wanted us to create our story.”
The district evaluated multiple platforms. The decision, ultimately, came down to two things: intuitive design and authentic partnership. Apptegy delivered on both.
“Apptegy removed a lot of barriers that other platforms made painful. And because those barriers were removed, we had a lot more participation.”
One System. One Brand. Everywhere.
Before Apptegy, communication across Cheyenne Mountain’s campuses were a quilt of communications. Some schools relied on social media. Others sent emails that piled up in inboxes, unread. Important updates lived in different places, forcing families to hunt for information, a small friction that over time, quietly erodes trust.
Apptegy collapsed that into a single, district-branded system: unified website, mobile app, alerts platform, and live feed, all operating from one tool and one visual identity. Families stopped seeing third-party interfaces. They started seeing Cheyenne Mountain, its colors, its voice, its values everywhere they looked.
The shift to text-first communication was, by Babcock’s account, transformative. The district had previously relied on Infinite Campus for messaging. In practice, that meant email, floods of emails. “You get bombarded,” he says. “Now we can prioritize. When a text comes through, families know it matters.”
Apptegy’s multi-channel alerts system lets the district send text, email, voice, and push notifications simultaneously, segment audiences for targeted outreach, and sync directly with student information systems for accuracy. The result is communication that feels intentional and families who actually pay attention.
Turning Principals into Storytellers
The most important thing Apptegy changed at Cheyenne Mountain was not a feature. It was a culture.
Babcock spent time training school secretaries and campus administrators to use the platform’s Live Feed directly from their phones. The old workflow of taking a photo, transferring it to a computer, uploading it to a platform, writing a caption, finding the right page, and then publish took twenty minutes on a good day. It took time most people did not have.
The new workflow takes thirty seconds.
“Apptegy removed a lot of barriers that other platforms, whether they knew it or not, made painful,” Babcock says. “And because those barriers were removed, we had a lot more participation.”
Today, principals post in real time. Aerospace engineering students launching rockets on a windy Colorado morning. Robotics teams celebrating regional wins. Drama productions. Student spotlights. Advanced Placement milestones. The homepage feels alive because, in every meaningful sense, it is fed by a distributed network of campus storytellers who needed only the right tool and the confidence to use it.
When Babcock finished training the school secretaries, their reaction was telling: “Gosh, this is just so intuitive. I said, yeah, I don’t think you’re going to be calling me much. And they really don’t.”
“When we moved to Apptegy, most of my administrators were just like, ‘Thank God.’ And some of them were like, ‘It’s about time.’”
Create Once. Publish Everywhere.
Cheyenne Mountain’s communication delivers on an Appetgy core principle: create once, distribute everywhere. A principal posts to the Live Feed. With a few clicks, that update flows to the website, pushes to the mobile app, shares to social media, and reaches families by text or email all under the district’s brand.
There is no version control problem. No off-brand post from a rogue campus account. No family who receives the news from a third-party source before hearing it from the district. Every touchpoint reinforces the same identity, the same voice, the same story.
That consistency, Babcock argues, is not just aesthetically pleasing. It is the foundation of trust. And in a state crowded with strong districts, trust is the competitive advantage that cannot be manufactured.
A Communications Machine. Zero Communications Staff.
Six years into their partnership with Apptegy, Cheyenne Mountain’s outcomes speak for themselves.
Enrollment demand has never been stronger. Families register for a waitlist and still show up at midnight. The district does not advertise. It does not need to.
Storytelling is distributed across every campus. Principals and secretaries publish independently.
Communication reaches everyone. Text alerts arrive even on phones where the district app has never been downloaded. No family falls through the cracks.
The brand is unified. Every post, every alert, every page reflects Cheyenne Mountain not a vendor, not a platform, not a template.
Staff feel empowered. The technology did not add work. It eliminated the friction that had been quietly discouraging participation for years.
“Apptegy removed so many barriers. That ease of use has just been a huge game changer for us.”
Building the Circle Wider
Cheyenne Mountain is already thinking beyond its current enrollment families. The district is building a Community Hub, a dedicated section of the website aimed at residents who do not currently have students in the schools: alumni, empty nesters, long-time community members who may one day vote on a bond referendum or a facilities expansion.
“We want to keep them up to date on the great things that are happening here,” Babcock explains. “Just to invite them back, hey, come to a game. Come see a choir performance. These are your schools.”
The strategy pairs digital storytelling with old-fashioned relationship building: print newsletters with QR codes driving traffic back to the website, email opt-ins, and social media amplification. The goal is not to sell anything. It is to ensure that when the district needs its community, the community already knows the story.
It is, in its own way, the same philosophy that drives everything Cheyenne Mountain does: build the relationship before you need the support.
The Bottom Line
Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 did not become Colorado’s top-ranked district because of its communications platform. It became the top-ranked district because of its teachers, its culture, its expectations, and its community. Apptegy did not create that excellence.
What Apptegy did was give that excellence somewhere to live, a platform worthy of the story, simple enough to be used by everyone, and powerful enough to reach every family, every voter, and every person who has ever been proud to call this top district home.
For a district with no communications staff and a great deal to say, that makes all the difference.
