Every district in America dreads board reporting season. The specifics vary — some boards meet monthly, some quarterly, some on a schedule that seems designed to maximize inconvenience — but the request is always the same. The board wants enrollment trends, budget status, assessment results, attendance rates, and staffing updates. They want it in a clean format. And they want it by Thursday.
For Wendy Strevel, Supervisor of Data & Communication at Millington Municipal Schools in Tennessee, that request used to trigger a three-day process that consumed her entire week.
The Old Process
Before Arcline, assembling a board report at Millington meant pulling data from at least five different places. Enrollment and attendance came from the student information system. Assessment results lived on a separate state platform. Budget figures required a request to the business office. Staffing data sat in the HR system. And demographic breakdowns — the ones the board always asked about but never in the same format twice — required manual cross-referencing across multiple exports.
Once Wendy had the raw data, the real work started. Each data set needed to be cleaned, formatted, and organized into slides or tables that a non-technical audience could follow. Enrollment by school and grade. Attendance trends compared to the same period last year. Assessment proficiency broken out by subject and subgroup. Budget actuals against the approved budget. Staffing vacancies by building and role.
Then came the verification. Every number had to be triple-checked, because a wrong figure in front of the school board isn't a minor error — it's the kind of thing that gets mentioned at the next three meetings. Wendy would cross-reference her slides against the source systems, ask colleagues to spot-check the finance data, and review the whole package at least twice before submitting it to the superintendent for final approval.
Three full days. Every month. For one report.
What Changed
Millington Municipal Schools started using Arcline's automated dashboards in late 2025. The district had already connected their SIS, assessment platform, finance system, and HR records through Arcline's data integration layer. The data was flowing. What they needed was a way to turn that data into something the board could read without a data dictionary.
Now, when board reporting season arrives, Wendy opens Arcline and types: "Generate board report for January." Within minutes, she has a pre-formatted report with enrollment, attendance, assessment, and budget data — sourced live from every connected system, assembled into the layout the board expects, and ready for review.
"We used to dread board reporting season. Now I generate a full compliance dashboard in 10 minutes. I don't know how we operated without this."
— Wendy Strevel, Supervisor of Data & Communication, Millington Municipal Schools
What the Reports Include
The automated board reports aren't generic summaries. They're structured documents built around the metrics school boards actually ask about:
- Enrollment by school and grade. Current enrollment counts for every building, broken out by grade level, with net change from the prior month and from the same month last year.
- Attendance trends with year-over-year comparison. District-wide and building-level attendance rates, displayed as trend lines that make it immediately visible when something is moving in the wrong direction. Chronic absenteeism rates are flagged separately.
- Assessment proficiency rates. The most recent benchmark or state assessment results, broken out by subject, grade band, and student subgroup. Where historical data exists, proficiency trends are included automatically.
- Budget vs. actuals. A summary of approved budget by fund, year-to-date expenditures, and remaining balance. Line items that are significantly over or under budget are highlighted — not buried in a table where no one will notice until it's a problem.
- Staffing status. Current FTE counts by building and role, open vacancies and how long they've been posted, and any positions filled since the last report.
Everything is exportable. Wendy can generate a PDF for the board packet, export individual sections to slides for the superintendent's presentation, or share a live dashboard link for board members who want to explore the data on their own time.
Automated Doesn't Mean Unverified
One concern we hear from data directors is reasonable: if the report is auto-generated, how do I know the numbers are right?
Arcline's approach is built around traceability. Every data point in a board report links back to its source system and the specific record set it was calculated from. If the enrollment figure for Millington Elementary says 412, Wendy can click through to see exactly which student records make up that count, which system they came from, and when the data was last synced.
This matters because Wendy's job didn't disappear — it changed. She's no longer spending three days assembling data. She's spending 30 minutes reviewing it, checking for anything that looks unexpected, and adding context the board needs to understand the numbers. The assembly is automated. The judgment is still hers.
That's the distinction we think matters most. Board reports require trust, and trust requires a human in the loop who can say "this number is correct, and here's why it looks different from last month." Arcline handles the tedious work of gathering, formatting, and organizing. The data professional handles the work that actually requires expertise.
The Broader Pattern
Millington isn't unique. Across our district partners, we see the same cycle: talented data staff spending most of their time on report assembly instead of report analysis. The people best equipped to help a district understand its data are stuck exporting CSVs and formatting PowerPoint slides.
Board reporting is where this pattern is most visible, because the stakes are high and the deadline is fixed. But the same dynamic plays out with state reporting, federal compliance documentation, grant progress reports, and the ad hoc data requests that land in a data director's inbox every week.
The data already exists in the district's systems. The question is whether someone has to spend three days assembling it by hand, or whether they can spend 10 minutes reviewing what's already been pulled together — and use the rest of that time on work that actually requires their attention.
At Millington, Wendy got her three days back. She uses them to dig into the attendance patterns that concern her, to work with building principals on how to interpret assessment trends, and to prepare the kind of analysis the board didn't know they could ask for — because no one ever had time to build it before.
Board reporting shouldn't be a three-day emergency. The data is already there. It just needs to be assembled, formatted, and ready — before anyone asks.