For Curtis Bobray, a Senior Special Services Counselor at Central Piedmont Community College, joining a higher education environment for the first time in 2021 meant learning a lot of new things at once. When Central Piedmont implemented Symplicity Accommodate in the summer of 2024, Curtis wasn't on the implementation team, but he quickly became one of its most invested advocates on staff. They launched in the fall of that same year, and the rest is history!
"I've been instrumental in trying to use the system wisely," he said, "especially because I lead the counseling team. I'm always looking for more intricate ways to make sure the system is working best for us."
The transition didn't happen overnight. Central Piedmont's IT team ran into complexity when migrating data from the previous system — class imports took time, and the change wasn't without effort. But what stood out to Curtis was how Accommodate's team handled it.
"Accommodate and the team we had were very patient. They advocated for us with IT and were really communicative about where we were in the process."
That combination of a capable product and a responsive partner made all the difference.
Once the team was up and running, the impact on daily operations was hard to miss. Templates, centralized documentation, streamlined student communication — all in one place.
"The efficiency we now have with communicating with students, having that documented quickly, the ability to help more students in less time — it's been a tremendous feat for us," Curtis said.
One feature in particular stood out: the ability to track communication via a student case number, eliminating the old copy-paste shuffle between systems. This made a big difference.
"It's like when you don't have simple features and you get a new car. It's like, 'Oh, my AC works now. This is great.'"
Disability services doesn't just serve students — it depends on faculty to implement accommodations in the classroom. Curtis noted that Accommodate has made that relationship smoother as well. With training videos housed directly in the system and accommodation letters accessible at faculty fingertips, the back-and-forth has been reduced significantly.
"Faculty have told us that having this in Accommodate made it so much easier to understand how to implement accommodations," he said.
Central Piedmont has brought on roughly two new employees since going live with Accommodate in 2024, and Curtis sees the platform as a genuine training tool — not just a records system.
"It's been instrumental in helping new staff learn how to use the system because of the resources and training videos already built in. It helped us build a workflow we could use for onboarding."
The team is currently in the middle of a major initiative: eliminating physical files. Decades of paper records are being digitized and organized within Accommodate, with the help of custom reports to track progress.
And Curtis has his eye on the auto-renewal process as a next step to unlock even more efficiency for the team's 12 staff members.
"I'm excited about how much more efficient our system can be because of that."
One thing Curtis didn't expect? The peer network that comes with being an Accommodate user.
"At conferences, we're able to have discussions with people from other colleges who use the same system — about how we implement accommodations, how we use Accommodate to better assist students. That's been a nice benefit."
For institutions still on the fence about making the switch, Curtis's advice is straightforward: the resource library and support structure reduce the pressure of getting started.
"It gives you foundational skills so you don't feel like you have to contact your client manager every few seconds. And having a team that's willing to advocate on your behalf when you're dealing with other parts of your organization — that made the transition a lot easier."