ChalkHandoff
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Jimenez Julien, the person who answers the ChalkHandoff inbox

Founder and publication director at MLJ, SASU. He writes the product, sits on the demo calls, and reads every message sent from this site.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Role: Founder, ChalkHandoff

Company: MLJ, SASU, Paris

Works with: K12 teachers, grade leads, office managers and building principals in the United States

Email: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com

Why a product about substitute folders

ChalkHandoff started with a spreadsheet and a complaint. In the fall of 2023 I was helping a charter network in the Midwest clean up the systems their office staff ran by hand, and one attendance secretary showed me a shared drive folder called SUB PLANS with 61 documents in it. Fourteen were current. The rest were from teachers who had transferred, retired or simply given up on updating a file they hoped never to need. She told me the part I still repeat on demo calls: the plans are never missing on a calm day, only on the day somebody is throwing up at five in the morning.

I spent the next two years sitting in on absence mornings. Not interviews, mornings. I would be in a building at 6:15 while the office called the substitute pool, printed rosters, walked a guest teacher to a room, and then went back to the front desk to handle the car line. What I saw was that nobody lacked effort or care. What they lacked was a document that stayed alive. A sub folder is written once in August by an optimistic teacher, then rots, because the seating chart changes in October, a student moves in January, and the specials rotation flips in February when the music teacher goes on leave.

So the design decision underneath ChalkHandoff is boring and deliberate: the folder is not a document, it is a record that keeps pulling from the roster, the calendar and the lesson plan you already keep. The only thing a teacher writes by hand is the part no system knows, which is where the pencils live, which student needs a check in first thing, and what the sub should do when the projector will not connect. That part is worth an hour of your life once a year. Retyping the rest is not.

The second decision came from watching substitutes. Guest teachers are frequently retired educators, college students, or people working three buildings in a week. They are handed a paper packet at 7:40 and asked to run a day. So the handoff pack had to open on a phone, without an account, without an app, in the parking lot, in under five seconds, with the schedule at the top because that is the first question everybody asks. Every feature that failed that test got cut.

Experience and expertise

  • Twelve years building operational software for organizations that run on schedules rather than on sales pipelines, including school support services, clinical offices and field teams.
  • Two years of on site observation in 31 US public and charter buildings across the Midwest, Texas and the Mountain West, watching absence mornings from the front office side and the classroom side.
  • Practical knowledge of the K12 data stack that matters here: PowerSchool, Infinite Campus and Skyward roster exports, Clever and ClassLink rostering, Google Classroom, and how absence management systems like Frontline and SmartFind Express fit alongside a plan product rather than replace it.
  • Working familiarity with FERPA as it applies to a vendor acting as a school official, plus the state student data privacy agreements districts ask vendors to sign before a purchase order is cut.
  • Founder and publication director of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes ChalkHandoff and is legally responsible for this site.

How this product is built and maintained

Every claim on this website comes from either product usage data or a named customer who agreed to be quoted. The numbers on the home page, including the 43 minute median setup, the 1 minute 50 second median handoff and the 94 percent open rate before first bell, are measured across the buildings on the platform during the 2025 to 2026 school year, and they are refreshed each June rather than left to age quietly. If a number moves in a direction we do not like, it still gets updated.

Product work runs on a two week cycle and the roadmap is set by the same three questions, asked of teachers and office staff in monthly calls: what did you have to retype, what did the sub still ask you about, and what did the office have to print anyway. Anything that does not answer one of those three waits. Bug reports that touch an absence morning skip the queue entirely, because a broken handoff at 6 a.m. cannot wait for a sprint boundary.

Editorially, the standard is the same one I would want as a reader. No manufactured urgency, no invented awards, no statistics without a source we can point to. Testimonials are published with the person's full name, role, school and city, and every quoted person has approved the exact wording. When a feature is on the roadmap rather than in the product, this site does not describe it as if it already shipped.

What I am accountable for

I am accountable for three things. That the handoff pack reaches the substitute and opens on their phone. That student information stays inside the boundaries a district would recognize as reasonable, with need to know notes visible and everything else not. And that the address at the bottom of this page reaches a person who can actually change the software, not a ticket queue. If ChalkHandoff costs you more time in a school year than it saves, say so in writing and I will refund what you paid.

Published articles

Everything I have written for The Sub Folder, the ChalkHandoff magazine on substitute coverage in US public and charter schools, is listed here with its publication date.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with your grade level or your building, and tell me what your last absence day actually looked like. If you would rather see it than read about it, ask on the walkthrough form and we will build a sample room from your bell schedule. Replies come within one school day.

Maintained by Jimenez Julien, publication director at MLJ, SASU and the person who answers the ChalkHandoff inbox. Read the author page or write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.