Schools (and government entities in general) really need to invest on setting up their own apps and programs for things like this. So much public school money gets wasted on paying for access to buggy and poorly maintained systems.
I work in a public school and it’s so frustrating to know a company is making bank for offering a mediocre middle man app, it hurts the Schools budget, the students, and in this case the families of all those students.
The photon front-end looks clean and runs well on both my mobile and desktop. I do agree with another commenter (coolkat, I think) that’s it’s not as cute and unique as the current front end, but maybe that’s possible to change – you did mention that it can have a custom color scheme. Or maybe it’s good to have it clean and polished, I guess it’s just personal preference.
I appriciate all the work getting done & hope the vegans find this instance to be welcoming and respectful :)
Oh and if replacing ssds starts to get expensive because of poor optimization, I would be down to donate to the cause. Hopefully a way to fix that issue comes along somewhat soon.