Holly Area Schools serves one of Michigan’s growing communities with a robust early childhood program spanning four elementary buildings. The program blends state-funded GSRP, federally funded Head Start and private-tuition preschool alongside before and after care (Latchkey) at every building and a district-wide summer program. Managing this patchwork of funding streams, enrollment types, and licensing requirements falls to one person: Early Childhood Principal Candice Davies.
Davies brings more than two decades of early childhood leadership to the role. Before joining Holly, she already had an extensive career in child care, including eighteen years as the director of early childhood at Livingston ISD, where she built a reputation for leveraging technology to run lean, data-driven programs. When she arrived at Holly in 2025, what she found was the opposite.
The Challenge
When Davies walked in the door at Holly Area Schools, Procare was already on the books, but barely being used. Each of the four elementary buildings had been set up as a separate, siloed database. Staff were still relying on paper sign-in sheets, handwritten time cards, and manual billing processes. Different programs (GSRP, Head Start and tuition) operated almost entirely independently of one another.
The consequences were significant.
No real-time attendance data: If the superintendent called in an emergency and needed a district-wide preschool headcount, Davies had no way to provide one. With paper-based sign-in spread across four buildings and inconsistent digital adoption, there was simply no single source of truth.
Untracked outstanding balances: Because each building operated as its own database, a family could leave one school with an unpaid balance and re-enroll at another building with no one the wiser. A child could carry a significant outstanding balance that simply didn’t follow them.
Billing errors and revenue leakage: Tuition billing was still being managed by classroom teachers, not billing staff, using paper-based processes. Latchkey leads were sending home half-sheet paper statements by hand. Nobody had a clear picture of what was owed, what had been collected or what was slipping through the cracks. The program was running at a deficit.
Payroll inefficiency: With roughly 40 hourly staff members submitting paper time cards, payroll processing consumed Davies’ weekends. Timecards arrived at different times, from multiple buildings and in varying formats, making discrepancies difficult to audit after the fact. Manual entry practices also introduced inconsistencies, while the shift to digital time tracking has significantly improved accuracy and accountability, reducing unintentional inconsistencies in reported time.
Compliance risk: Licensing-required HR documents were being kept in triplicate: one copy in the classroom, one in the building’s central office, and one at the district level. All were paper. Keeping those records current, complete and audit-ready was a constant burden.
Davies put it plainly. “If you were to say, ‘What is your outstanding balance, or how much have we collected in registration fees? Do you have space available in before and after care?’ I couldn’t tell you my first four months here.”
The Turning Point: Consolidating and Actually Using Procare
Davies wasn’t new to childcare management software; she had built a custom Microsoft Access database earlier in her career and spent years running programs on ChildPlus at Livingston ISD. She recognized quickly that Procare had the capabilities Holly needed. The problem wasn’t the tool; it was adoption.
Within her first few weeks, she reached out to Procare’s team to work through the consolidation question: should she wait until the start of the next school year to migrate all four building databases into one unified system, or move immediately? Her account contact walked her through the tradeoffs, provided a trial environment to explore and helped map out a migration plan that preserved existing child records and billing history rather than starting from scratch.
Her rollout strategy was deliberate. She identified a handful of early adopters on staff, particularly those who were most frustrated with paper time cards, and piloted new features with them first. Once those staff members could speak from experience about how much easier the digital workflows were, peer adoption followed naturally. For parents, she worked with teachers to identify willing families who could help test digital registration and document upload before rolling it out broadly.
“I don’t know that I honestly really had much pushback on it. I think they were ready for a change.”
I can tell you how many students are here. I can tell you how many incident reports I have for the day. We are no longer in deficit.
Candice Davies, Early Childhood Principal of Holly Area Schools
Source: Customer Interview
The Impact: Real Data, Real Relief
Program-altering financial turnaround: Perhaps the most striking outcome: Davies shares that fully implementing Procare’s billing, time-tracking, and attendance systems resulted in a significant financial turnaround. A program that was previously operating at a deficit is now financially stable.
The recovery came from multiple directions at once: eliminating billing errors in tuition collection, accurately capturing Latchkey attendance for invoicing, recovering DHS billings that had previously fallen through the cracks and capturing the real hours that hourly staff were working rather than the rounded-up figures on paper time cards.
Payroll that takes minutes, not weekends: With 40 hourly staff members across four buildings, payroll had been a multi-day ordeal. Now Davies pulls a sign-in/signout report from Procare, runs it through a custom Excel template she built once and payroll is done. What used to consume her weekends now takes a fraction of the time, and the data is auditable. If a staff member questions their pay, she can show them exactly what was logged.
Instant visibility across all four buildings: Davies can now answer the superintendent’s emergency headcount question in seconds. She can see real-time attendance across all four buildings from her phone, regardless of where she is. She can check how many children are in Latchkey at any given building, determine whether staffing levels are appropriate and make adjustments on the fly. “It doesn’t matter where I am. I can say, ‘There are twelve kids. I don’t need three people there.’”
Smarter staffing decisions for summer programming: When planning the district’s summer program, Davies had no historical data to work with; nobody had ever captured enrollment patterns or hourly attendance trends. Using Procare’s historical sign-in/ sign-out data from the prior year, she was able to identify that the final 30 minutes of the program day (5:00–5:30 PM) consistently served only one or two children. The result: she cut that half-hour from the schedule, reducing staffing costs and giving employees an earlier end to their day. “Some of the staff are excited. They can leave at five instead of five thirty.”
Licensing and compliance, simplified: Rather than maintaining triplicate paper files for every staff member’s licensing-required HR documents, Davies has scanned and uploaded everything into Procare. Holly’s licensing compliance officer now has her own Procare login and reviews staff files, children’s physicals and developmental records remotely, before she ever sets foot in a building for a formal review. “She’s truly there for the children” when she visits now, Davies noted, rather than spending her time chasing down paperwork.
A single child record from interest to exit: Every child in the program now has a complete digital file in Procare, from the moment a family expresses interest, through registration, enrollment, attendance, developmental screenings (ASQ), home visit records and eventual exit. Teachers are no longer responsible for billing. Parents can register, pay and upload required documents through the platform. Newsletters and communications go out through Procare as well.
Davies estimates she’s been able to accomplish roughly 90% of what she needs entirely within Procare, a significant consolidation for a program that was previously cobbling together paper, spreadsheets, and multiple disconnected systems.
What’s Next
Davies continues to push the edges of what Procare can do for Holly. She’s built out an extensive library of custom profile fields and tags, including bus routes, overdue balances, three-year-olds with current physicals and My Registry training completion by year, that allow her to slice and filter data precisely when she needs it. She’s tracking ADA compliance requirements as the district works toward a 2027 deadline and has already begun standardizing parent-facing communications.
Her advice to other early childhood administrators considering a similar path: “You have to try it. It is part of getting processes and procedures in place. There’s always going to be bumps…but it is a time saver and it’s more accurate.”
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