It's the first week of September, which means somewhere right now, a data coordinator in a school district is staring at a spreadsheet with 2,000 rows, wondering why half the students who enrolled in June don't appear in the SIS with the correct grade level. Their phone has three missed calls from building principals asking why rosters are wrong. Their inbox has 47 unread messages. The state reporting deadline is six weeks away.
This is back-to-school season for the people who manage district data. And it looks like this every single year.
The September Sprint
If you work in a school district — not in a classroom, but in the central office — September isn't a fresh start. It's a controlled emergency. The work that has to happen in the first three weeks of school determines whether the district's data is accurate for the entire year. If enrollment counts are wrong in September, they're wrong in October when the state snapshot is due. If roster assignments don't match staffing records, class size reports are off, funding calculations are off, and someone gets a call from the state department of education that nobody wants to receive.
Here's what the first three weeks typically look like for a data coordinator in a mid-size district:
- Re-enrolling students manually. The summer SIS migration — the one that was supposed to roll students forward into new grade levels with all their demographic data intact — didn't carry over all fields. Maybe the home language survey data is missing. Maybe the special education flags didn't transfer. Maybe the 300 students who enrolled over the summer were entered by building secretaries using three different naming conventions. The data coordinator re-enters or corrects records for hundreds or thousands of students, one at a time.
- Reconciling class rosters with staffing assignments. The master schedule says Mrs. Patterson teaches 4th grade at Lincoln Elementary. The SIS says she's assigned to 3rd grade at Washington Elementary — because someone forgot to update her assignment after the summer staffing shuffle. Multiply that by 15 buildings and 600 teachers, and reconciliation takes days.
- Setting up new assessment platform accounts. The district uses three assessment platforms. Each one requires student accounts to be created or synced from the SIS. The SIS export format is slightly different from what each platform expects. One platform wants the student ID with a leading zero. Another strips leading zeros. A third uses a different field entirely as the unique identifier. Every year, this takes a full week of the data team's time.
- Pulling last year's data for year-over-year comparisons. The superintendent wants to see September enrollment compared to last September. The director of accountability wants attendance trends. The special education coordinator wants to know how many students with IEPs transferred in over the summer. Each of these requests requires pulling historical data from archives, matching it to current records, and formatting it into something readable. These comparisons should be automatic. They never are.
The File Naming Convention That Says Everything
You can measure how broken a process is by looking at the file names. In almost every district we work with, we find some version of this:
Enrollment_Report_FINAL.xlsx
Enrollment_Report_FINAL_v2.xlsx
Enrollment_Report_FINAL_v3_REAL_FINAL.xlsx
Enrollment_Report_FINAL_v3_REAL_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx
This isn't a joke. These are real file names from a real district's shared drive. They exist because the same report gets updated seven times in two weeks as numbers change, corrections come in, and someone realizes the original pull excluded a building. There's no version control. There's no single source of truth. There's just a folder with 15 files and a prayer that everyone is looking at the right one.
And this is September. This is before the October state snapshot. Before the December federal data collection. Before spring assessment season. This is just the beginning.
The Same Data, Entered Four Times
The core problem isn't that the work is hard — it's that so much of it is repetitive. The same student's enrollment record gets entered into the SIS, then exported and re-imported into the assessment platform, then manually entered into the state reporting system, then typed into a spreadsheet for the superintendent's enrollment update.
Four systems. Same data. Entered separately in each one because the systems don't talk to each other — or because the integration between them broke last spring and the IT department hasn't had time to fix it because they've been setting up 4,000 Chromebooks for the start of school.
When a principal calls the data office and asks "How many new enrollments at Jefferson?", the answer should take 10 seconds. In most districts, it takes 45 minutes — because someone has to open the SIS, run a query, cross-reference it with the enrollment forms that came in yesterday but haven't been entered yet, check whether the summer transfers were processed, and then call the building secretary to confirm two records that look like duplicates.
Forty-five minutes for a question that has one answer sitting in one system. But no one can get to it without doing archaeology.
The Ask Isn't for Less Work
When we talk to data coordinators — and we talk to a lot of them — they don't ask for less work. They don't want to be automated out of a job. They ask for less repetitive work. They want to stop entering the same data into four systems. They want reports that pull from live data instead of last week's export. They want a principal's enrollment question to take 10 seconds instead of 45 minutes. They want to spend September setting up their district for a successful year — not fixing data entry errors from a migration that should have been automatic.
The requests are modest. Sync student records across systems so the data coordinator doesn't have to be the human integration layer. Generate the comparison reports automatically so nobody is rebuilding last year's spreadsheet from scratch. Give every report a single, canonical version so nobody has to guess which file to trust.
These aren't moonshot requests. They're table stakes in every other industry. Somehow, in K-12, they still feel like a luxury.
Data Team Burnout Is Real
We talk a lot — rightly — about teacher burnout. We don't talk nearly enough about data team burnout. These are the people working 12- to 14-hour days in September, coming in on weekends to meet reporting deadlines, fielding calls from every building and every department that needs a number. They're the ones who make sure the enrollment counts are right so the funding formula works. They're the ones who make sure assessment data is clean so teachers can actually use the results. They're the ones who make sure the state gets what it needs so the district stays in compliance.
When a data coordinator burns out and leaves — and the turnover rate in these roles is higher than most people realize — the district doesn't just lose an employee. They lose the institutional knowledge of every workaround, every system quirk, every undocumented process that keeps the data infrastructure running. The next person starts from scratch, in a role with no manual, and September is coming whether they're ready or not.
These are the people who make sure the numbers are right so the decisions can be right. They deserve tools that match the importance of their work. And they deserve a September that doesn't require surviving.