Industry · K–12 school districts
Enrollment and average daily attendance by school and grade, chronic absenteeism, assessment results, and what each site actually spends — in one live view. A senior US-based engineer builds it on your student information system, your finance system, and the extracts you already prepare for the state. Most builds land in 3–5 business days.
Representative dashboard — sample data
One view of the district
A district collects more data in a week than most businesses collect in a quarter. Attendance is taken every period, enrollment changes daily, assessment files arrive from the state and from benchmark vendors, and the business office tracks every dollar by fund, function and site. The problem is never collection. It is that enrollment lives in the student information system, spending lives in the finance or ERP system, assessment results live in a vendor export, and the version leadership reads is a spreadsheet someone rebuilt the night before the board meeting.
That rebuild is where the definitions drift. The attendance office counts days one way, the state submission counts them another, and the cabinet deck rounds a third. We fix those definitions once, in a governed model, so the enrollment figure a principal sees on Tuesday is the same figure in the superintendent's board packet and the same figure the assessment director uses when comparing proficiency across sites. Nothing is re-keyed, and nobody has to defend which spreadsheet is current.
What we build for districts
Buy a block of prepaid Flex hours and, if you're unhappy within the first 4 hours, we refund you in full — no questions asked. Hours are deducted only for work you've reviewed and approved, there's no project minimum, and your banked hours never expire.
Why districts call us
You send the request; a senior engineer maps your SIS, finance system and state extracts into one model built for how a district's year actually runs.
Active enrollment, entries, exits and mid-year mobility by school, grade and program, netted properly, so a family transferring between two of your own campuses is not counted as one departure and one brand-new student.
Average daily attendance against your calendar, plus chronic absenteeism tracked as a running rate rather than a June post-mortem, so an intervention team can act in October when a pattern is still reversible.
State summative results and interim benchmark files joined to the same student and school dimensions, so proficiency and growth can be read next to attendance, course marks and program participation instead of in a separate vendor portal.
Site-level expenditure by fund and function, pulled from the business office system and set against enrollment and outcomes at the same school, so resource conversations start from one reconciled picture.
Program and demographic dimensions your district already maintains — special education, English learners, low-income eligibility, homeless and foster youth — available as filters on every view instead of as a stack of one-off exports.
Row-level security by site, grade span or role, so a principal sees their own campus, the cabinet sees the district, and student-level detail stops circulating as emailed spreadsheets nobody can recall.
Three families of data. Student: the enrollment record, daily and period attendance, course and section rosters, marks, discipline events, and the program flags that define your student groups. Assessment: state summative results plus whichever interim or benchmark files you run during the year. Business: the finance or ERP ledger by fund, function, object and site, along with position control and staffing. The model joins them on student, school, and school year, which is what makes any per-pupil or per-site figure possible at all.
The hard part is agreement, not visuals. Is a student enrolled from the date of registration or the first day they attend? Does a student who moves between two district schools in November count once or twice? Which attendance codes count toward apportionment, and how are independent study or remote days treated? Does a September ninth-grader who transfers out in April stay in the cohort? We settle those choices once, as documented DAX measures (opens in new tab) rather than formulas typed into individual charts, so no two reports can quietly disagree. Our Power BI data modeling and DAX service covers how that layer is built, on a star schema (opens in new tab) the way Microsoft recommends.
Every district is different, and your state's accountability model decides some of this for you. The set below is where we usually start: the student count, the attendance picture, academic results, the student groups underneath them, and the staffing and spending that produce all of it — with the systems each figure typically comes from.
| Metric | What it answers | Typical source |
|---|---|---|
| Enrollment by school and grade | How many students are actually enrolled today, and where | SIS enrollment records with entry and exit dates |
| Average daily attendance | Attendance against the instructional calendar, by site and month | SIS daily and period attendance |
| Chronic absenteeism rate | Which students and schools are trending past the state threshold | SIS attendance history joined to enrolled days |
| Mobility and transfers | Entries, exits and mid-year movement between district schools | SIS enrollment events |
| Assessment proficiency and growth | How results moved by school, grade, subject and student group | State summative files plus interim or benchmark exports |
| Course marks and failure rates | Where students are falling off track before a test says so | SIS gradebook and transcript records |
| Discipline and suspension days | Incident counts, instructional days lost, and disproportionality | SIS behavior and discipline module |
| Student group participation | Counts and overlaps for special education, English learners and other groups | SIS program flags and eligibility records |
| Staffing and class size | Section sizes, vacancies and staff-to-student ratios by site | HR or position control joined to SIS section rosters |
| Per-school expenditure | What each site spends by fund, function and object | Finance or ERP ledger coded to site |
| Cohort completion | Four-year cohort progress, credit recovery and completion | SIS enrollment history and transcript records |
The student information system is the anchor. Skyward, PowerSchool and Infinite Campus cover most of the districts that call us, with Aeries, Synergy and Tyler SIS close behind, and the extraction route depends on the vendor and your contract: a reportable database or replica, a hosted warehouse the vendor already populates, an API, or a scheduled extract you can rely on. We establish which of those your agreement actually allows before designing around it, and we confirm the method and any vendor charge for data access in the scope estimate, because in this sector reporting access is sometimes a paid module rather than an included feature. Districts on PowerSchool can read the routes out in detail — read-only ODBC, a PowerQuery published through a plugin, or the plugin REST API — on our PowerSchool Power BI dashboard page, which covers the extraction and the enrollment, attendance, GPA and behavior grain rather than the metric definitions on this one. Districts on Infinite Campus have a different set of doors — an Ad hoc Reporting export, the Data Extract Utility, or the OneRoster API, with the state hosting the instance in several states — and those, plus the join to MUNIS for site spending, are covered on our Infinite Campus Power BI dashboard page.
Around it sit the finance or ERP system for site-level spending, position control and payroll for staffing and class size, assessment vendors for interim results, and the extracts your team already builds for state reporting — CALPADS in California, TSDS in Texas, PIMS in Pennsylvania, and their equivalents elsewhere. Those state files are usually the cleanest starting point we can ask for, because someone has already reconciled them. Federal aggregations of the same data, such as the Common Core of Data published by the National Center for Education Statistics (opens in new tab), are useful for peer context but always lag your own systems by a year or more, which is exactly the gap a district dashboard closes. Districts with long attendance histories get incremental refresh (opens in new tab), which Microsoft documents, so each nightly run processes only the days that changed instead of reloading years of period-level detail.
Through row-level security in the model. Each user account maps to a school, a grade span or a role, and every visual filters to that scope automatically. It is enforced by the model rather than by which file someone was sent, so a principal opening the report sees their own campus, the cabinet sees the district, and student-level detail never leaves as an attachment that outlives the person who requested it.
Microsoft documents the mechanism in its guide to row-level security in Power BI (opens in new tab), and our own walkthrough of a Power BI row-level security setup shows the roles and test steps in detail. This matters more in a district than almost anywhere else, because student records carry obligations under FERPA — the US Department of Education's Student Privacy Policy Office (opens in new tab) is the authoritative reference. Those obligations stay with the district; what we do is build to the access rules your student data privacy officer sets, test the roles against real accounts before go-live, and document who can see what.
It feeds the first and stays out of the way of the second. Board meetings already run on enrollment, attendance, assessment and budget updates, so we frame the district view in the same vocabulary and let the board packet be generated from the model instead of assembled by hand. The format side of that work — a fixed monthly pack, consistent period definitions, a version trustees can open on a tablet — is covered on our Power BI dashboard for board reporting page.
State reporting is deliberately untouched. Your submissions continue to originate in your SIS and your existing certification process; the dashboard reads the same underlying data so the district can see its own numbers weekly rather than at each snapshot date, and can catch a coding problem while the window is still open. To be clear about scope: this is a management reporting tool, not a compliance system, and we do not provide legal, funding or accountability advice. Budget work sits in the same relationship — we surface site spending next to enrollment and results, while the mechanics of fund-level budget versus actual, variance commentary and forecasting belong to our Power BI dashboards for finance teams.
You buy prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with senior hourly work from $100: Starter is 20 hours ($2,500), Growth is 40 hours ($4,600), and Power is 80 hours ($8,000). Nothing starts before you approve a scope estimate, so the build is priced up front rather than billed open-ended — which is what makes it purchasable against a line item rather than a procurement project. A first enrollment, attendance and assessment dashboard on a single SIS usually fits inside the Starter block.
Adding site-level spending, staffing and multi-year trend analysis generally moves a district to the second tier, because that is where the finance ledger and prior-year files have to be reconciled rather than simply loaded. There are no project minimums and hours are deducted only for work you have reviewed. That structure suits a district budget cycle: bank hours once, spend them when the board asks a new question in February or when the assessment window closes in May. See how prepaid Flex hours work, including the published tiers.
Small and mid-sized public districts — roughly the range where assembling the board packet by hand is a real monthly cost, but a full internal data team is not in the budget. It fits superintendents and cabinets who want one set of numbers, chief business officials who need site spending next to enrollment, assessment and accountability directors who spend weeks reconciling vendor files, student services teams working chronic absenteeism, and principals who would rather open a live report than request one. County offices and charter management organizations running several campuses on one SIS fit the same pattern.
Three nearby cases are worth separating. A foundation or education nonprofit funded by contributions rather than by tax revenue and state apportionment has a genuinely different reporting problem, and that one lives on our Power BI dashboards for nonprofits page. A college or university is different again — the buyer is the institutional research or enrollment management office, the metrics are the admissions funnel, retention and net tuition revenue, and the reporting regime is IPEDS rather than a state collection — so start with Power BI dashboards for higher education instead. And if you would rather see the shape of the output before talking specifics, our Power BI dashboard examples gallery shows how these views are laid out across industries. Contact is form-only — send your request and we'll reply with a scope estimate.
business days, typical
hours, never expire
own everything
Bank hours once and spend them as the board asks new questions. See Flex pricing →
How it works
Tell us your student information system, how many schools you run, and which questions go unanswered today. We reply with a scope estimate and the hours needed before any work begins, including how we would extract your enrollment and attendance data.
A senior US-based engineer joins students, schools and the school year into one model, writes the DAX for enrollment, attendance, absenteeism and assessment growth, configures school-level security, and reconciles the totals to your own state submission — typically 3–5 business days.
We publish to your Power BI workspace, set nightly or incremental refresh, and hand over the model and credentials. You own everything; we keep the refresh healthy and add views from your banked hours as the year progresses.
Representative perspective
Our attendance office, our state submission and the deck we brought to the board never quite agreed, so every meeting opened with a discussion about which enrollment number was right. Putting all three on one model ended that.Assistant superintendent, mid-sized public district
Representative perspective
Seeing chronic absenteeism as a running rate instead of a year-end report changed which schools we sent support to. By November we were working the right campuses instead of finding out in June.Director of student services, K–12 district
Tell us your student information system and how many schools you run. We'll scope the task and tell you the hours before any work begins — drawn from prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with no project minimums and no obligation.
FAQ
Any SIS that exposes a reportable database, a replica, an API, or a dependable scheduled extract. Skyward, PowerSchool and Infinite Campus are the platforms we see most, along with Aeries, Synergy and Tyler SIS. Access routes differ by vendor and contract, so we confirm the extraction method in the scope estimate before hours are used.
With your state's rules, not ours. We take the attendance codes, apportionment rules and calendar your district already reports under, and write them once as documented measures. Most states treat chronic absenteeism as missing ten percent or more of enrolled days, but the exact rule and the excused or unexcused treatment are yours to confirm.
Yes. Row-level security maps each signed-in user to a school, a grade span or a role, and every visual filters automatically. Student-level detail stays inside the model rather than in emailed workbooks. FERPA obligations remain the district's, and we build to the access rules your student data privacy officer sets.
No. Your state collection stays exactly where it is, in your SIS and your existing submission process. The dashboard reads the same underlying data so the district can see its own numbers weekly instead of at each snapshot date, and can spot a coding problem before the certification window closes rather than after.
Most requests are delivered within three to five business days of your approval, and a first enrollment, attendance and assessment dashboard usually fits inside one prepaid block. Flex hours never expire: Starter is 20 hours ($2,500), Growth 40 hours ($4,600), and Power 80 hours ($8,000), with senior hourly work from $100.
Book a free demo
Tell us the task. We scope it, you approve, and a senior consultant delivers — typically in 3–5 business days. Prepaid hours that never expire.
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we'll reply within one business day.