How Genius SIS Supports Enrollment & Learning at Optima Academy Online

In a recent conversation exploring the intersection of cutting-edge educational technology and robust administrative infrastructure, Dave Schmidt, Sales Manager at Genius Learning, sat down with Fallon McLaughlin, the Director of Admissions at Optima Academy Online.

As a recognized leader in virtual reality-based education, Optima Academy Online currently supports over 1,200 students nationwide and is poised to double its enrollment in the coming year. During their discussion, Fallon shares how her team navigated the challenges of rapid growth by transitioning to a more flexible student information system. She details how Genius Class serves as the vital “backbone” for their school, providing the necessary automation and data orchestration to manage complex enrollment journeys and diverse student funding models.

The following Q&A highlights the critical role that a centralized system of record plays in supporting innovative learning environments and ensuring operational excellence in the digital age.

Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Dave: Good morning. My name is David Schmidt. I’m a Sales Manager at Genius Learning whose product, Genius SIS, is the world’s leading student information system built specifically for the needs of digital schools. It’s my pleasure to be joined this morning by my colleague, Fallon McLaughlin, the Director of Admissions at Optima Academy Online. Optima is a recognized leader in virtual reality based online education in Florida and beyond. Fallon has been a dedicated leader. supporting this groundbreaking endeavor for over four years, playing a key role in shaping and growing the school’s innovative approach to learning. Fallon, good morning and welcome.

Please tell us a little bit about your background and your role at Optima.

Fallon: Hi. Good morning, David. It’s so good to be here with you today. My name is Fallon McLaughlin and I’m the Admissions Director at Optima Academy Online. As you said, I’ve been with Optima for just a little over four years now. I’m very excited to be a part of this wonderful community of online learners that’s really kind of leading the way for virtual reality and education in the online learning space.

I have a background in admissions and I worked in higher education as well as enrollment management, so I bring that with me to the team, as well as a bit of operations experience.
Dave: That’s really helpful. Tell us about the school itself as well.

Fallon: Optima Academy Online currently serves over 1,200 students nationwide. We’re very excited to look at doubling our enrollment next year due to the strong interest that we have right now. It’s a fully virtual accredited, online school, and in the state of Florida, we are a virtual instruction program provider approved. This means our courses are state standard approved. We offer K-12 accredited courses, starting in 2026-2027.

Students can learn by teacher-led courses or self-directed courses. These teacher-led courses are live instruction with other students and a teacher at the center of the classroom. The self-directed courses offer some flexibility for students, which is really great for a lot of online learners, especially those that are homeschooling their students and need that flexibility.

We are state standard approved in Florida, so we are tuition free in the state of Florida for families, so that’s a really incredible opportunity. We also are partnered with scholarship and state funding organizations across the country, so we are actively working to do that in all states – or as many as we possibly can so that families can also access our courses using scholarship funds.

We’re excited that our online learning program offers the structure, flexibility, and community that online learners are looking for. What makes us different is that we offer virtual reality, starting in fourth grade. Students will receive a VR headset, they will join their teachers and classmates in the VR space, and it’s an incredible opportunity for them to bring the learning to the next level.
Imagine learning about the water cycle over a call like this, or a teams call, or hearing about it or reading about it, but then going into virtual reality and building it with your classmates and your teacher, bringing in 3D models in a really fun space. It’s a cool opportunity for these students to have access to this tool.

Our younger grades get exposed to it in 2D version, which is really fun. They start to learn the terminology and things like that. We also have a strong community of families that actively meet together and organize meetups, social opportunities, clubs, and social hours. It’s great for that connection and support that online learners are still looking for when they are learning online.
Beyond our school, we also partner with schools across the country and world that want to bring VR field trips or content into their learning space. Teachers will have access to over 200 immersive locations, thousands of models, and a content library that teachers and students can access.
It’s really great what we’re doing here at Optima and our parent success stories speak for themselves. We’re really happy to be here in this space for families and the education community.

Dave: Sounds so effective and exciting. I want to enroll my sixth grader and my third grader!

Fallon: Right?!

Dave: My second question, what are the most important conditions for success in your role at Optima?

Fallon: It’s really bringing all the teams together. We have really strong communication and collaboration across all of our teams and we want our users, our families, and our schools to feel supported and have what they need to be successful in their learning environments.

Across Marketing, Product, Admissions, Finance, and IT, we’re constantly coming together and improving our processes, hearing from our families and making sure that our data speaks for itself. We want to ensure that we’re being proactive and that our workflows and operations are running smoothly.

Dave: What role does a student information system play in your success and that of the Optima team more broadly?

Fallon: At Optima Academy Online, we need a system that organizes our applications and our student information so that we can support our families and students, as well as our teachers and administrative staff that need to plan for academic coaching and things like that. It’s really the backbone to the school. It allows us to manage our student information, our applications, documents, compliance of teachers’ certification and things like that as well. It also allows us to be more efficient and organized with the student information that we’re receiving from families and teachers.

Dave: Previously, you were served by a different SIS. What were the biggest challenges you had, whether they were data management, reporting, enrollment, et cetera, that led you to change student information systems recently?

Fallon: We are growing and we are growing really fast. So, we needed a system that would grow with us and allow us to track our data, automate some of our processes, and create automated reporting. A system that would grow with us and that could have opportunities for development in ways that we weren’t really receiving from another system.

Dave: How do you use the Genius Student Information System to make your enrollment more efficient and more effective?

Fallon: One of the cool things about Genius is that there are a lot opportunities for building out exactly what we need to serve our purposes. So that’s been really nice to work with the development team on those things.

Being able to streamline our full enrollment journey is important to us – from initial application to confirmed enrollment. Also, being able to have the communication and the applications system so we can actively track where an application is for accurate follow up to ensure things don’t fall through the cracks.

We have a lot of different types of students, whether they’re scholarship or tuition free, or private pay students. So being able to create those flows and fields and processes to manage those students effectively and have the reporting on them has been really great.

Dave: I have one more question for you. How does Optima use Genius to inform instruction?

Fallon: We are connected with an LMS. The student information system, though, allows us to pull in information for more comprehensive data. For example, what’s going on with their attendance and their academic record? It’s an administrative tool for our team and it allows us to look at all of the different types of student information, like exceptionalities, learning performances, prior academic performance, et cetera, so the teachers and staff can pull that data and then be able to work with that as they help their students and families. It’s a centralized data system that supports, our staff as well as the ability to group students and families into affiliations and, when needed, have their student records flagged so that certain teachers, coaches, and staff members can pull that information more efficiently.

Dave: Thank you so much for joining us for our first, podcast here at Genius. I look forward to continuing to work with you and the team at Optima Academy Online.