Jay: What is going on? This is Jay and Michael here on The IT Directors Podcast. We have Stan, our CEO and our owner, today. How you doing, Stan?

Stan: Hey, doing great. Thank you for having me.

Jay: Look, we are really excited, Michael, about today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about District Intelligence.

Michael: No, I’m excited about getting into this. It’s something that we’ve met with a lot of schools and organizations about, and I’d say every organization that we’ve gotten in front of, the response has been tremendous because of the need that it fills.

I’m looking forward to talking more about this today.

Jay: It’s great. It’s one of our flagship applications, District Intelligence, powered by School Manager, and a lot of our listeners and viewers know about School Manager. But Stan, give us an overview of District Intelligence, how this came about, and really the high-level view of what it is.

Stan: Sure. When we were looking at the possibility of getting into the AI business, and looking at how it would affect school districts and even higher ed, we started coming up with the idea that we want to do AI readiness assessments and that kind of thing.

Then, Jay, you started to bring it in, because being an IT director, you knew some of the issues for school districts and school officials looking for different items, different reports, different dashboards, and different information that they need. I know you’ll get into this, but your superintendent comes to you and says, “Hey, I need a bunch of reports,” and you have to go crank them out and get the data from all these systems. So I think about it as business intelligence for schools.

BI has been around for years, but even for a commercial company it’s usually difficult, because you have to bring in all these sources and figure out what information you want. It’s been quite the project. But Jay, you came up with this whole idea. You were visiting one of our clients, and you said, “What would probably be good is… We need essentially BI for schools.” You said, “I’d like to see if we can pull in all their sources and everything.” Tell us about that. How did you come up with it, and can you explain it?

Jay: It really just happened organically. From being an IT director and being in cabinet meetings with the superintendent and academic officers, they were always asking for these reports. They would say, “Hey, Jay, can you give me this and this data?” And I had access to the data, Stan and Michael, but we didn’t really know how to correlate it. We could pull certain reports, but we couldn’t pull everything.

From that experience, and then meeting on site with one of our customers and talking back and forth with them, he said, “This is exactly what we need. I need this.” We got back in the office, we met, and we talked to James, our director of development, and our software team, and he took our concept and nailed it together.

Now we have District Intelligence. We’re able to deliver an intelligence and decision-making dashboard with all these data points correlated. Superintendents want to know the attendance rate of school X, how their grades are, how their performance is in math, what their performance is in reading, and how their standardized testing is. They want to correlate all of this. Now we have a platform that can do that for schools.

That’s how the concept happened, and then just by talking to customers and more people in the industry, we saw that this is a big need. K-12 people and everybody that we’ve shown it to, from the superintendent level to the CFOs to the COOs, see the instant value, because they’re being asked this stuff daily.

Michael: I think it’s a natural thing where you’ve got an organization, a school system, with different departments and different entities. It’s a natural process to focus on what’s in front of you, and each department is responsible for different deliverables. So, “We’re focusing on this, we’re focusing on this,” and then you create silos. Siloed departments mean siloed data. I think this has been an awesome thing to help bridge that gap.

Jay: And then you can sit in a meeting, and the superintendent and the cabinet level can have visibility into a single pane to see everything in their district at once. And it’s accurate. Another challenge in K-12 was providing data but having the confidence that it was accurate, and knowing how to correlate it. District Intelligence has been a game changer in the K-12 space, and it will also be in the higher ed space, where you can have a login where superintendents can see one pane, the financial team can see one thing, and the network team can see all their uptime and downtime. We’re correlating everything together.

Stan: One thing I think this started out as was, we can get all that data in one spot and give them dashboards and reports and things that really matter to them: grading, testing, financial, technology, all of that information. I know when we first saw the data come in, we said, “Wow, this is even bigger than we ever thought.” We were shocked.

But the one thing I was really impressed with was the correlation and the insights that we can get from the data once you get it all together. Talk a little bit about that.

Jay: That’s a great point, Stan. We have a whole section in District Intelligence, Michael, that is insights and correlations. It takes these data points, whether it be academic versus attendance versus behavior, and with the way our application team has written this, it takes all of these things together and gives insights to district leaders. For example, “This kid is four times more likely to have grade issues because their attendance rate is X.” It blew me away. It is amazing. We were reading it and I said, “This is exactly what I needed 10 years ago, five years ago,” and now we can deliver it.

There are also those insights on behavior issues, and on network and device insights, like “These schools are approaching refresh rates” based on the data that you’ve inputted. Before, Stan, they had to manually go pull that out of their ticketing system, look at POs, and look at spreadsheets.

Michael: Wow. I even love that you can lay over what their environment is like, the network and the whole environment, and then associate that with the student experience. That’s a piece that’s been missing, and I think this helps answer that.

Jay: It does.

One thing, Stan, that just blew me away once we had the application fully launched was seeing the cost per student by school. It basically tells the district, “This is what you’re spending per student to deliver education, technology, and resources,” and I was amazed by the correlation and the insights around that.

The way it summarizes everything in plain English is also important, because not everyone is a data manager in the school district, so a lot of these reports don’t make sense to them. But it puts the insights in plain English where you can understand them. That was one thing that really stood out to me, Stan.

Stan: One thing I was also impressed with on those insights was that a lot of times people put in all this intelligence information and get all the data, and they get the reports and say, “Okay, I got the report. It looks good and everything.” But the data may not be right.

That was one thing with District Intelligence that I was so amazed at: some of the insights it could go and look at, and it says, “Hey, this data may not be right. You may want to look at it.”

Jay: And it takes the human element out of it, Stan. On the human side, we look at things and we emotionalize them. “Well, that could be right, Michael. This could be…” Our platform is purely looking at data and analyzing it, so it can find anomalies.

Here’s a great example. We had a proof of concept running in a school district, and it found some attendance integrity issues. “Miss So-and-So’s classroom, her attendance is way off from everyone else.” Come to find out that teacher wasn’t really taking attendance right, and our tool found it in the data. So it gives school districts not only great insights and correlations, but also finds data integrity issues, payroll issues, and budgetary issues. You have call centers, and it says, “This call center was budgeted X amount of dollars, but they actually spent this much.” It can find these issues for them.

Stan: That’s one thing we always see. The information is only as good as the data, right, Michael? We see that in our business too. So I think it’s very good that it’s already able to see, “Hey, this could be an issue.” I’ve been really impressed with its ability to go find those issues and bring them up.

Another thing I was very happy with is that this is really business intelligence, District Intelligence, and the information is always updated every day. That’s great. And that information is always right there at the fingertips of a superintendent, an IT director, a CFO, or whoever needs that data, at any point.

Jay: Stan, we met with a superintendent yesterday, and Michael and I were talking about this prior to the show, and that was one of the things that stood out to him. This is the superintendent of a school district. He or she is not in the weeds, but they want to be able to get this information delivered, because they have to deliver it to the school boards. And this is what their core business is: teaching and learning.

He said, “Hey, I have never seen a tool where I can look and just see attendance at every school. I can see grades. I can see performance. I can see what is up and down on my network, all in one place.” His exact words were, “This is fantastic.”

Michael: Somebody in that position doesn’t need to be in the weeds, and this helps them stay out of it. This helps their teams take the data that they already have and put it into a platform, and now we can make intelligent decisions, smarter decisions that are going to impact the students ultimately.

Jay: And you think about the simplicity of it, Stan, of having a dashboard. You think, well, that’s a simple thing. In concept it is simple, but in reality it’s very complex, because we’re pulling in multiple data sources. I mean, the way James and his team nailed that together and did all the correlations. There’s a back end that shows, here are the data points, here are our metrics, and then the insights that Stan was talking about, where you can see these things on a graph. You can hover over it, and it shows you the students that it actually got that information from. So it’s not just, “We think that this is the case.” It is actually factual, based on the student population.

You can drill down and see that at a granular level, which gives validity to the reports, and that’s what the superintendents really love about it. It also helps IT directors become heroes, because now they can deliver this information. They can say, “Sure, Superintendent So-and-So, we’ll give you a login. You can have this.” Now they can deliver that, and they can automate it. We’ve just seen such value, and I’m excited. It’s unlike anything out there right now.

Stan: That’s one thing you mentioned, giving a login to someone. We can make that very granular and say, “They only need access to this type of information.” The superintendent maybe needs everything, but the CFO is really interested in the budget and maybe the technology component. The MTSS team may just need more of the student information. That’s one thing that I’ve really liked.

Jay: It’s role-based. It’s so granular, like you said, Stan, and we can customize a role, Michael. For instance, District Intelligence is our K-12 platform. We have the business platform as well. You could have marketing. I thought about this yesterday: you could have a marketing silo within there where you’re pulling information and you can have all the data tied around that. A lot of school districts now have marketing teams and PR teams, public relations teams, especially bigger urban school districts. I thought, we can tie in that public relations data, and now they can see where their campaigns are reaching and how it’s benefiting student success, because that’s what district leaders want to see.

I’m excited about it for us as a company. I think it’s a phenomenal tool, and it couples with our School Manager platform and delivers very good value for the cabinet-level staff.

Stan: One of the things I also like about the application, and I want you to talk about this, Jay, is that a lot of times, Michael, you get reports and you can look at them, and it’s good information. But you would really like to understand that information a little better. That’s something that was built into District Intelligence. Talk about that.

Jay: Yes, we can build reports. You can do customized reports off every subset of data, whether it be attendance, disciplinary issues, financial, or network, all these different things. We can build reports, and it pulls the data into a graphical table, but it also summarizes these reports so people can understand what they’re looking at. That’s what you’re talking about, and the superintendent said that yesterday. We were meeting with him, and he looked at this and said, “Man, now I understand what this is.”

We left a very large district down South, and one thing we understood after leaving that district was that District Intelligence makes the tools they have in place work better and more efficiently, because they can take that information and now people can understand it. The CFO can’t understand network reports from tools like that. But when you summarize it, they know: “School X, Y, Z needs to refresh, and here’s the dollar amount.” It puts everything down to common language, where it summarizes every correlation. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and we’re super happy about it.

Michael: I think it goes back to what we were talking about. You can make smarter decisions. You can make faster decisions. You’ve got the data that you have, and now you can understand the insights with the whole reports. And you’ve got the ability to tailor the reports for what you want to see, what you’re actually trying to report on, and get those specific things that matter to you based on your level, position, or the district overall.

Jay: And you can compare, Stan, how you’re doing as a school district versus the state and then the national level. Every school district has access to its data sources at the state level and national level. So not only does the leadership team in an organization get access to how they look, but now they can compare, “Here’s how we’re doing versus how everyone in the state of Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, wherever, is doing,” and how they’re doing nationally.

That’s even better, because these things come up at school board meetings. I’ve been at a school board meeting where the school board asked for a data point, and people were scrambling. You could see panic set in. They’re like, “Oh gosh, how do we…” And it was weeks before they could deliver that. Now the superintendent, the CFO, or the COO can come up to the podium, pull up District Intelligence, and show them right then, because this access is real, and it’s live. It’s updated daily. That’s another thing: with that daily live update, they can have confidence that this is what is happening at that very moment in their school district.

Stan: Let’s just take that. They’re in the board meeting and they get asked a question. Well, District Intelligence allows you to ask questions about the data.

Jay: Yes. We got that input, and James put that into the system. So not only can you click and see and read, it’s all AI-driven to deliver talking and texting into it. You can say, “Pull up every school where the attendance rate is less than 20% and show me how their test scores correlate.” Boom, and it pulls up a report in the chat. You can click a button to add it to the report. You can say, “Show me the devices at that school that are broken,” and you can just keep going and pull it up. And to your point, they don’t even have to type into it. They can just talk into it. It will deliver, because it’s all built with our AI tools to correlate and deliver that, which is really incredible.

Stan: It’s amazing. One of the things I know, when you and James were collaborating and talking about what is needed for the districts, is that obviously this is student information, so we need to make sure it’s secure. Talk a little bit about what y’all looked at in making sure things are going to be secure.

Jay: That’s great, because as you know, we’re in the day and age where we’ve talked about cybersecurity, we’ve talked about phishing on our podcast, and there’s no more data that you need to protect more than student data. School districts across the nation take this very seriously. Every state has policies, and so we did a data governance policy internally. We have a data governance and student privacy policy that we share with school districts, so that way they’re covered and we’re covered.

Our data center is here in the United States, so the data is not going outside of the country, which is a big thing in today’s world. It is also not being shared with any third parties. It’s purely their data, and they’re the only ones that have access to it through their platform. We’re SOC 2 Type 2. We meet all the security parameters in terms of security and how we operate. We take a lot of pride in that data security and governance around student data. And you’re also bringing in financial data, so there’s a lot of important data there.

We got asked in a meeting, “What happens if I have District Intelligence running for five years, and then I decide we don’t want to use it anymore?” Their instance is wiped. We don’t save any of that data. We don’t own the data. We’re managing their platform for them.

We were very thoughtful about how we approached the security around that. I can’t speak enough about our web development team, our engineering team, and James and our development team, and how they put these guardrails in place. That way people can feel secure, because at the end of the day, you just don’t want that data going out somewhere. We replicate that in-house. It’s not going overseas. We take a lot of pride in making sure we secure everything internally.

Stan: That’s great. Just to summarize, how can this product help a school notice a problem sooner, and what can it do for a school over what they’re doing today?

Jay: That’s a great question. It can give you direct access to critical information that you really need daily and haven’t had access to. You can deliver any kind of reports, any kind of critical data, at the fingertips of just logging into your District Intelligence platform.

Typically, the setup in school districts is that there’s one person who can pull student information. If that one person is out sick, or busy running state reporting or doing attendance counts, whatever the case may be, those things can get backlogged. Now you have people who can access this because it’s pulling from the systems, and we’re correlating it for them. It can add value in showing critical data, especially around attendance, grades, and state testing and standardized testing within the district.

We can also bring in security information, such as door badge access, camera footage, and incidents, and we can correlate that. You can bring fire alarm data into District Intelligence, too. Security teams can look at this, and a lot of school districts have security operations centers where they have to disarm alarms all the time. It’s on big monitors, and there’s no real reasoning behind it. Now we can say, “These schools had alarms today.” You can deliver a lot of critical information and have access to it instantly, versus having to call another department.

As the IT leader in the district, in the cabinet, you disseminate that information. You decide who has access and who doesn’t, and now those people are empowered. They’re not calling out to you or the school board. They can log in any time and see how we’re doing. That’s really the value: it takes the load off the local school staff from having to stop. I was in that seat, and I cannot tell you how many times I got called by board members and the superintendent. When they call, you have to stop. You have to deliver, and then everything else stops. I could have just given them a login and said, “Here’s a link. Go check it out. It’s all there.”

It can really make a difference in the day-to-day of the leadership in the school district, and the parents too. There’s even a phase of this that we haven’t touched on, which is a parent portal piece where parents could see a high-level overview of how their kids’ district is doing. How great is that for PR and public relations? That’s how I think it can ultimately add value and change the day-to-day for school board employees.

Stan: Yeah, no doubt. I feel like this product is pretty revolutionary. Like you said, we have not really seen anything like it out in the market, and we’ve been very impressed. I’m just going to do a little shameless plug and say, go to districtintel.com. There’s a live demo out there that you can see, and then contact us. The way we can do it, we can do a demo, or we can do a POC with your own information. It’s very powerful. Everybody I’ve seen see it, their eyes just light up.

Jay: To your point, Stan, we haven’t shown it to someone in leadership who didn’t instantly see the value. So if you have data issues out there and you don’t know how to deliver, go to districtintel.com. Go to clearwinds.net and check it out. Hit the live demo and reach out to us, reach out to our marketing team, because when you see your data in it, that’s when it makes the big difference. You’re like, “Wow, I didn’t know this is what my stuff looked like.” That makes a huge difference.

Michael: Awesome. Jay, we appreciate you sharing those details. I really feel like this is a game changer for a lot of the school districts that are out there. And Stan, we appreciate you being here with us today.

Stan: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Michael: This is Jay and Michael signing out.