The app families
have right now.
Gateway families already have a school app. It is called Gateway College Preparatory, and it is a white-label template from an outside vendor — the same shell that publisher ships to Calvary Chapel Christian, Donum Dei Classical Academy, Christ the King, and Evergreen Lutheran, with a different logo on each.
Parents already treat it as the school’s main channel. That is what makes its condition worth reading closely.
3.5
out of five on the App Store, across thirteen ratings
3.4
out of five on Google Play
Oct 2021
the last release that changed anything but the app's metadata
App Store and Google Play listings, read August 2026.
Then we asked
the parents.
In August 2025 a post in the Gateway parents’ group asked plainly what the app got wrong. It drew 51 likes and fifteen comments, and not one of them defended the status quo. Two complaints came up on their own, from people who had not been prompted for either.
The alerts arrive late, or not at all. And nothing can be found.
“I love getting an important alert from the school where my children are and having to hit retry 5000 times to get something other than a timeout error.”
“this seems like a website in an app wrapper. An actual Android app would be great”
“I’m tired of waiting 5 minutes to see a notification.”
It reaches you
before the carline.
When the school decides something that changes your morning, it goes to the families it affects as a push notification — onto the lock screen, without an app to open, a portal to check, or an inbox to scroll.
Every alert is written and approved by school staff. Nothing automated ever sends on its own.
Tuesday, February 3
6:12
Gateway ParentsnowEarly release Friday — buses at 1:30
School releases at 1:00 for staff development. Aftercare is open as usual.
Example alert
The whole school, laid out.
Five tabs, and nothing to learn. What the school posts is what you see.
Calendar
Every event, early release, and holiday — with one tap to drop any of it into your own phone calendar.
Announcements
News from the school and from individual programs, in the order it was posted. Save anything you want to come back to.
Alerts
Only the listings you chose. Change them any time in Settings.
Resources
Lunch menus, forms, the family handbook, reporting an absence, and the links the front office is asked for most.
Ask gAItor
An assistant that answers from what the school has published. Off until you turn it on.
Directory
Inside Resources: who to contact, by department, without hunting through the website.
Ask gAItor.
gAItor is an assistant inside the app that answers from one source and one source only: what Gateway has published. The calendar, the announcements, the resources, the questions the front office answers most. Ask it when the next early release is and it reads the same calendar you would have read.
It cannot look up a student, because the app holds no student records to look up. Conversations stay on the phone — nothing is kept on a server. It is off until a parent turns it on.
If the school has not published something, gAItor does not have it either. That limit is the feature.
Open it in a browser
The same assistant runs on the web, with no app and no install, so anyone can put a question to it right now.
chat.gcps.appBeta. Same published sources as the app.
Posted once.
Everywhere at once.
Staff write the calendar, the announcements, the resources and the answers in Gateway Connect — a console built for this school, not a shared vendor dashboard. A post is reviewed and approved before it goes anywhere, and every send is written to an audit log with the name of the person who sent it.
World Cultures Night, on September 24, went up from that console this week. It was on the calendar in the app, at the top of Announcements, and answerable by gAItor before the tab was closed.
Staff sign in at admin.gcps.app
124
staff profiles in the directory families can search
11
events already on the calendar, running through January
9
alert listings a family chooses between
Live in production, counted 31 August 2026.
There is nothing here to lose.
Most school apps are built on top of a student information system, so they hold grades, schedules, and rosters — and they make you log in to protect all of it. This one is built the other way around.
- No accounts
- There is no sign-in, so nothing in the system is tied to your name.
- No student records
- No grades, attendance, schedules, or student names. Not restricted — absent.
- No advertising
- No ad SDK, no trackers, and nothing about you is sold or shared.
- Anonymous alerts
- Turning on notifications stores a device token and your chosen listings. A device, not a person.
- Nothing kept from gAItor
- Questions are answered and let go. The thread lives on your phone, not on a server.
The full privacy policy and terms of service spell this out in detail.
Where this
stands today.
This is version one. The content above is live in production and maintained by staff. What follows is everything that is not settled — posted here rather than left for someone to find out later.
On TestFlight, not the App Store
Build 19 is live with a small group of Gateway families on iPhone. The store listing is the next step, not a shipped one.
iPhone first
The Android build has never been compiled. There is no date to give, so there is no date here.
Alerts are best effort
Push delivery depends on Apple's network and the settings on each phone. The app is additive — the school's email and phone calls continue exactly as they are.
No adoption numbers
The app has not been offered to every family, so there is nothing honest to say yet about how many use it. The devices registered so far are testers.
Gateway College
Preparatory School
3360 Westinghouse RdGeorgetown, TX 78626
(512) 868-4947info@orendaeducation.org
Ranked among America’s best high schools by U.S. News & World Report in 2026 — the top 12% of public high schools nationally, and the top 11% in Texas.
For school staff
Staff manage the calendar, announcements, and alerts in Gateway Connect.
admin.gcps.app