St. Cecilia's Conservatory trains pre-professional dancers from age six through pre-college. The academy runs a year-round program in Boston, a six-week summer intensive that draws students from 38 states and 14 countries, and a financial aid program that reaches more than 200 families each season.
Before PCR Educator, three of those programs ran on three different systems. The year-round school used a conservatory SIS. The summer intensive used a custom-built audition portal. Financial aid lived in a spreadsheet maintained by the registrar. The information about a single dancer might be entered three times before they ever stepped into a studio.
What they built on PCR Educator
The academy consolidated onto PCR Educator over a single calendar year. The team migrated audition video review, summer intensive scheduling, year-round class enrollment, financial aid awarding, and parent communication onto one platform with one family record per dancer.
- Audition video submissions arrive through a branded portal that captures the dancer's profile, technique level, and supplementary materials. Reviewers score in PCR Educator's intake interface and the system feeds decision letters directly into the email queue.
- Summer intensive selection runs as a separate workflow on the same family record. Dancers who started with the year-round program no longer fill out a second application.
- Financial aid moved from spreadsheet to PCR Educator's aid module, with award letters generated from the same template library that produces decision letters.
- Class scheduling, faculty assignments, and recital tickets all run on PCR Educator, so a dancer's schedule, attendance, costume measurements, and family contact stay together.
The audition pipeline at scale
The largest operational change is the audition pipeline. Before PCR Educator, a panel of three artistic staff members reviewed every video submission manually, with rubrics that lived in a shared Google Doc and decisions tracked in a spreadsheet. The bottleneck was the rubric. The fix was not to remove the rubric but to put it inside the platform.
Reviewers now score on a structured form with six dimensions (technique, musicality, alignment, artistry, potential, and stage presence) and PCR Educator aggregates and ranks. Decisions reach families within ten business days of the submission deadline.
What changed for families
Families log in to one parent portal that covers tuition, financial aid, class schedule, summer intensive registration, and recital tickets. The portal is co-branded with the academy and the support emails come from the academy's domain.