By Koydo Lingua Team·Published May 25, 2026

Case study · Jersey City, NJ · 27 seats · 9 months in

St. Anne's Microschool · how one operator runs four language cohorts on Lingua.

Dr. Eleanor Lee runs a 27-seat private microschool in Jersey City. Spring 2026 her students gained an average of 0.42 CEFR levels in 90 days, parents posted a rolling-30 NPS of 71, and her admin workload fell from 70 hours per month to roughly 8. Below is exactly how, in her words and ours.

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Seats running

across 4 language cohorts

Avg CEFR gain · 90 d

+0.42

across all cohorts

Parent NPS

rolling-30 · industry mean 28

Admin time reclaimed

62 h/mo

vs prior LMS stack

Before Lingua · After Lingua

What changed — line by line.

Metric	Before	After	Note
Total monthly stack cost	$1,610	$405	27 seats × $15 = $405; vs LMS + 3 separate tutor SaaSes + parent comms + roster sync
Operator admin hours / month	~70 hr	~8 hr	62 hr reclaimed = 1.5 working weeks back
Tutor admin hours / month	~56 hr/tutor	~2 hr/tutor	Per tutor; St. Anne's has 3, so 162 cumulative hours back
Parent communication tools	5	1	Bloomz + email + Sheet + texts + paper handoff → Lingua family inbox
Compliance reporting	Manual	Auto-generated	FERPA / COPPA / IDEA / NJ homeschool 10h/wk all surfaced in one dashboard

Implementation timeline · zero to fully live

Four weeks. No data migration drama. No tutor reskilling.

Week 0
First conversation → signed pilot
Headmaster Dr. Lee reached out via /for-schools. We did one 45-minute call. She had three concerns: COPPA + IDEA compliance, multi-tutor coordination, and whether a 27-seat school was big enough to matter to us. We sent the signed DPA the next morning + a 30-day pilot at no charge up to 25 seats. Pilot started 6 days later.
Week 1
Roster import + COPPA + tutor onboarding
Roster CSV uploaded with built-in COPPA validation. 22 parental consent emails sent automatically; 21 returned signed within 48 hours. Sarah Chen + Daniela Rivas (existing private tutors at the school) onboarded via magic-link to Lingua Educator in roughly 12 minutes each. Both connected Stripe Connect Express.
Week 2
First cohort lessons + parent reports
Spring B1 French cohort started Mon. First week's lessons used 4 engine templates (transit + ordering, weekend storytelling, pronunciation lab nasal vowels, vocab quiz). First parent digest auto-sent Friday — 19 of 22 families opened it, 14 replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
Week 3
M. Anderson invited as third tutor
Dr. Lee wanted to add an ESL adults cohort for parents in her network. Invited M. Anderson via Lingua Educator; he onboarded in 10 minutes and built the cohort in another 20. First adult ESL lesson ran Saturday with 8 enrolled parents.
Week 4
Pilot review meeting + full-year sign-on
End-of-pilot review with Dr. Lee. We brought the auto-generated board packet (cohort gains, tutor performance, parent NPS, standards alignment, COPPA audit trail). She signed a full-year contract at the 25-99-seat tier ($15/seat/mo). Pilot students rolled into the paid contract with zero data migration — same engine, same accounts.

Three voices · operator, tutor, parent

What it sounds like from inside the building.

“Before Lingua we ran French and Spanish through a combination of an old LMS, three different tutor calendars, parent communication on Bloomz, and a Google Sheet I'd been maintaining since 2022. The Google Sheet was the only thing that worked. When Lingua's roster sync pulled my whole sheet in nine minutes and matched every parent to every child with COPPA consent already filed, I cried at my desk. That's the truth.”

— Dr. Eleanor Lee, headmaster

“I've been tutoring at St. Anne's since 2024. The thing that changed when we moved to Lingua isn't the teaching — that's still me in a video room with a kid. The thing that changed is what happens before and after the lesson. The plan is pre-loaded, the parent recap drafts itself from the engine notes, the homework grades the part that's not a human judgment. I gained back about thirteen hours a week.”

— Sarah Chen, tutor (French)

“Mai was in Spanish at a different platform for two years. When St. Anne's switched her to French via Lingua, we braced for the disruption. There wasn't one. Mai's CEFR transferred, her tutor (Sarah) was already set up in our family inbox by the time Dr. Lee made the announcement, and the parent digest we get every Friday is the first piece of school communication we actively look forward to.”

— Anh + Daniel P., parent

What the board approved

Three lines that closed the unanimous vote.

1. Compliance package was already done. Signed DPA, FERPA-aligned data flows, COPPA flow for under-13s, and IDEA accommodation tracking — all in the platform before our first lesson. We didn't have to draft anything.
2. The operator hour-math was real. 62 hours of admin reclaimed monthly. We re-allocated that to fundraising and program-design. The first quarter alone we secured two new founders' circle commitments because Eleanor had the time to follow up.
3. The cost moved in the right direction. From $1,610/mo across five tools to $405/mo on Lingua. The board re-routed the $1,435 monthly delta into the scholarship fund — three additional learners enrolled by end of term.

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St. Anne's Microschool · how one operator runs four language cohorts on Lingua.

What changed — line by line.

Metric	Before	After	Note
Total monthly stack cost	$1,610	$405	27 seats × $15 = $405; vs LMS + 3 separate tutor SaaSes + parent comms + roster sync
Operator admin hours / month	~70 hr	~8 hr	62 hr reclaimed = 1.5 working weeks back
Tutor admin hours / month	~56 hr/tutor	~2 hr/tutor	Per tutor; St. Anne's has 3, so 162 cumulative hours back
Parent communication tools	5	1	Bloomz + email + Sheet + texts + paper handoff → Lingua family inbox
Compliance reporting	Manual	Auto-generated	FERPA / COPPA / IDEA / NJ homeschool 10h/wk all surfaced in one dashboard

Four weeks. No data migration drama. No tutor reskilling.

Week 0

First conversation → signed pilot

Headmaster Dr. Lee reached out via /for-schools. We did one 45-minute call. She had three concerns: COPPA + IDEA compliance, multi-tutor coordination, and whether a 27-seat school was big enough to matter to us. We sent the signed DPA the next morning + a 30-day pilot at no charge up to 25 seats. Pilot started 6 days later.

Week 1

Roster import + COPPA + tutor onboarding

Roster CSV uploaded with built-in COPPA validation. 22 parental consent emails sent automatically; 21 returned signed within 48 hours. Sarah Chen + Daniela Rivas (existing private tutors at the school) onboarded via magic-link to Lingua Educator in roughly 12 minutes each. Both connected Stripe Connect Express.

Week 2

First cohort lessons + parent reports

Spring B1 French cohort started Mon. First week's lessons used 4 engine templates (transit + ordering, weekend storytelling, pronunciation lab nasal vowels, vocab quiz). First parent digest auto-sent Friday — 19 of 22 families opened it, 14 replied with a thumbs-up emoji.

Week 3

M. Anderson invited as third tutor

Dr. Lee wanted to add an ESL adults cohort for parents in her network. Invited M. Anderson via Lingua Educator; he onboarded in 10 minutes and built the cohort in another 20. First adult ESL lesson ran Saturday with 8 enrolled parents.

Week 4

Pilot review meeting + full-year sign-on

End-of-pilot review with Dr. Lee. We brought the auto-generated board packet (cohort gains, tutor performance, parent NPS, standards alignment, COPPA audit trail). She signed a full-year contract at the 25-99-seat tier ($15/seat/mo). Pilot students rolled into the paid contract with zero data migration — same engine, same accounts.

What it sounds like from inside the building.

— Dr. Eleanor Lee, headmaster

— Sarah Chen, tutor (French)

— Anh + Daniel P., parent

Three lines that closed the unanimous vote.

1. Compliance package was already done. Signed DPA, FERPA-aligned data flows, COPPA flow for under-13s, and IDEA accommodation tracking — all in the platform before our first lesson. We didn't have to draft anything.

2. The operator hour-math was real. 62 hours of admin reclaimed monthly. We re-allocated that to fundraising and program-design. The first quarter alone we secured two new founders' circle commitments because Eleanor had the time to follow up.

3. The cost moved in the right direction. From $1,610/mo across five tools to $405/mo on Lingua. The board re-routed the $1,435 monthly delta into the scholarship fund — three additional learners enrolled by end of term.