Guardian Higher Education Case Study
How Alamo Colleges District Transformed Student Services and Case Management
Alamo Colleges District needed a faster, more flexible way to manage student services and casework across multiple departments. See how Guardian helped digitize 250,000 forms, streamline workflows, and deliver support to students on time.
Institution
Alamo Colleges District, Texas
Featured campus:
San Antonio College
Students served:
San Antonio College: 20,000 | Alamo Colleges District: 79,000+
Guardian customer since:
2022
Forms & Cases Managed:
250,000+
Who We Interviewed:
Josh Moran
Systems Administrator of Student Success and Guardian Super Admin, Alamo Colleges District
Benjamin Romo
Student Accessibility Services, San Antonio College, Alamo Colleges District
The Challenge
Alamo Colleges District serves more than 79,000 students across five colleges throughout the San Antonio metro area. Each campus manages thousands of student requests that require timely action, accurate documentation, and cross-department collaboration. Before adopting Guardian, they relied on paper forms, file folders, and spreadsheets.
This created challenges:
Students manually filled out forms
Paper files were stored across multiple offices
Limited visibility into form status
Long wait times for students
Significant administrative overhead
Difficulty tracking accountability and reporting
The Solution
In 2022, Alamo Colleges District adopted Guardian’s centralized case management platform.
Guardian handles cases across the student experience, from student services like VA benefits and accessibility accommodations, to academic matters like integrity cases and grievances, to processes like Pell Grant eligibility and admissions to competitive nursing and health science programs.
Since implementation, the district has successfully processed more than 250,000 student forms and cases through Guardian.
Replacing Paper With a Digital Workflow
Before using Guardian by Campus Kaizen, the Alamo Colleges team managed all student cases and intake forms on paper and in Excel spreadsheets. Benjamin Romo says, “It was taking a lot of time. We had rooms full of paper documents and then lines outside the door for students to try to submit those requests and get services.”
Once they adopted Guardian in 2022, students and staff both got their time back. “Now, since everything’s digital, students submit wherever and whenever they want. As we receive the forms, we process the cases,” explains Romo.
He also says that because Guardian allows multiple people to securely access cases and forms, they’re no longer trying to chase down files.
“In the past, there were case files all over the place. And if somebody came in or you needed to report something, you’d have to run from office to office trying to figure out the person who had that case.”
Moran says, “We have a lot of the Guardian links attached to our website where students need to complete intake forms … They click on the relevant link, they fill out the intake form, and then it automatically gets processed.”
Delivering Services Faster
Romo says that Guardian is absolutely essential to helping the Alamo Colleges team support students effectively. “If Guardian is not up or running, there’s no way for us to do our job because we do everything inside Guardian.”
He says that with Guardian, “Definitely more students gain services, but the most important thing is they gain services on time. Because we’re able to manage it, all of our accommodations go out before classes start. We’re able to process them very quickly now. In the past, it would be at least two weeks after the case came in just to review it.”
Romo continues, “Student services are really important, and that’s where we’re really using Guardian to lower the time that it takes a student to request a service and receive that service. That’s the biggest impact that we’ve had.”
Why They Recommend Guardian
Moran notes, “Guardian is very flexible as far as being able to create a lot of different forms and reports that we need. I think the ability to have a case management system behind all of the different cases is very helpful.”
“You’re also able to have an audit trail to see exactly what’s going on, where a case is at, why something hasn’t been touched. Because sometimes I have folks come to me and say, ‘What’s going on with this case?’ I’m able to pull it up really quick on the fly, say, ‘This is what’s going on. This is your bottleneck.’”
Romo adds, “We wanted a system that could do it all and then provide the data that we needed.”
“Guardian has the ability to do so much,” says Moran.
The Results
Since implementing Guardian, Alamo Colleges District has:
Managed more than 250,000 student forms and cases
Digitized critical student service workflows
Eliminated paper-based intake processes
Reduced administrative burden across departments
Improved collaboration through centralized case management
Increased visibility into every student request
Accelerated processing times for student services
Delivered accommodations before classes begin
Strengthened reporting and institutional accountability
Protect Students. Support Staff. Stay Compliant.
Guardian replaces disconnected processes with a single platform built for student services, compliance, and accountability.
Learn how Guardian can help your institution respond faster, improve operational efficiency, and deliver better student outcomes.