Why 5 Star Students is betting on Clever’s AnySchool to close its integration gap

5 Star Students, a small application partner serving roughly 300 districts and 1,200 schools, loses deals when a school’s student information system (SIS) falls outside its short list of direct integrations. With Clever’s AnySchool, the team expects to close that gap without building and maintaining new SIS integrations themselves.

5 Star Students is a campus toolbox that brings digital hall passes, flex tracking, digital student IDs, and a points-based engagement program together under one login for staff and students. Because the product touches daily attendance and classroom activity, it depends on accurate, up-to-date student and class data. Chance Hroch, who works across sales, support, and integrations at 5 Star Students, sees firsthand why that data dependency matters more as the company grows.

The Challenge: Deals stall when a school’s SIS isn’t covered

5 Star Students already integrates directly with Clever, ClassLink, Aries, and PowerSchool. But as a small team, it can’t justify building and maintaining a custom integration for every regional or less common SIS a prospective school might use — and when a school falls outside that list, the deal often stalls or falls through entirely.

The cost isn’t just that one deal. Features like digital hall passes require current class rosters, and schools without the manpower to update that data manually often churn or never fully onboard.

The Solution: One integration instead of many

What drew 5 Star Students to AnySchool was the prospect of covering SIS platforms it will never build direct integrations for — including Synergy and Q, two systems on its target list — through the Clever integration it already has.

For a team this size, closing that gap also means getting invitations into the right hands faster. Chance currently tracks a running list of schools with no integration set up at all.

“Getting the correct link into the hands of those 200 schools would be a game changer for us.”

The Expected Impact: Time back, cleaner renewals, easier security reviews

5 Star Students hasn’t fully implemented AnySchool yet, so the numbers below reflect what the team expects, not results in hand. Chance’s top priority is simple: get every school integrated, regardless of method, so his two-person sales team spends less time chasing manual uploads and more time supporting and selling to schools.

Chance also pointed to Clever’s role beyond onboarding: a single, clean dashboard for troubleshooting student data issues, and a smoother path through district security reviews when a data privacy agreement and Clever’s identity layer are already in place.

5 Star Students and Clever’s AnySchool team are still working out rollout details. Once AnySchool is live across 5 Star Students’ unintegrated schools, this story is worth revisiting with real before-and-after numbers.