Case Study: Deer Valley Unified School District boosts student pass rates and modernizes learning with Canvas LMS

Making the Change to an Innovative LMS for Innovative Education

Deer Valley Unified School District, serving about 34,000 PreK–12 students across 38 schools in northern Phoenix plus 1,500 annual online learners, faced a failing legacy LMS as it prepared for a 1:1 device initiative. The self-hosted system required manual updates, charged extra for mobile access, offered no vendor support for faculty, and left the district’s IT team managing a sprawling help desk—prompting a search for a more scalable, user-friendly platform.

After evaluating six providers, Deer Valley adopted Canvas for cloud hosting with automatic updates, included mobile apps, and tier‑1 vendor support. The district migrated eight years of content, trained roughly 1,600 teachers, rebuilt key online courses, and established teacher‑leader support teams. The Canvas rollout (piloted summer 2015) reduced technical questions, improved two-way communication via mobile notifications, enabled blended and flipped instruction, and correlated with higher pass rates in the online learning program.

Deer Valley Unified School District

Kristy Hirschberg

Manager of Instructional Technology & Innovative Programs