It's 7:02 a.m. and your district's data coordinator is already behind. There are 14 data requests in her inbox. The superintendent needs chronic absence numbers for a board presentation on Thursday. The Title I coordinator wants free and reduced lunch counts broken out by school for the federal compliance report due Friday. A principal at the middle school wants to know which of his 640 students scored below proficiency on the fall reading benchmark. And HR needs a staffing report by end of day — they're trying to figure out how many unfilled positions they're carrying into October.
That's before the phone rings. Before a teacher stops by to ask why a student's schedule looks wrong in the SIS. Before the assessment vendor sends an email about a file format change that's going to break the import she spent two weeks building.
This is a Tuesday.
The Translation Layer
Data coordinators are the people who sit between raw system data and every decision a district makes. They pull attendance records out of Infinite Campus so the superintendent can talk about chronic absenteeism at the board meeting. They reconcile enrollment counts across PowerSchool and the state reporting system so the CFO's budget projections aren't based on wrong numbers. They export assessment data from iReady, reformat it into the structure the state requires, and upload it before the compliance deadline.
They don't teach. They don't lead buildings. They don't write curriculum. Ask most people in a district office what the data coordinator does, and you'll get a vague answer about "running reports." That vagueness is the problem. The work is invisible precisely because it's foundational. When it's done well, everyone else gets clean numbers and accurate reports and assumes that's just how the data works. When it's done poorly — or when the data coordinator is out sick for a week — the entire district grinds to a halt.
Nothing works without them. Not board presentations. Not state reporting. Not federal compliance. Not the principal's request for a list of students who are failing two or more classes. None of it.
Self-Taught and Irreplaceable
Here's what almost no one talks about: the best data coordinators in K-12 didn't go to school for this. They taught themselves SQL because the SIS's built-in reports couldn't answer the questions people were asking. They figured out how to write VLOOKUP formulas across 10,000-row spreadsheets because the assessment vendor's export doesn't match the state's required format. They learned each system's quirks through trial and error — that PowerSchool exports dates in one format and the state system expects another, that Infinite Campus counts withdrawn students differently depending on which report you run, that the attendance file has to be tab-delimited, not comma-separated, or the upload fails silently.
That's not a job description. That's institutional knowledge. It lives in one person's head, in their bookmarked browser tabs, in the naming conventions of the folders on their desktop. When that person retires, or burns out, or takes a job in the private sector that pays twice as much, the district doesn't just lose an employee. They lose the only person who knows how the data actually works.
We've talked to districts where a data coordinator's departure set back their reporting capabilities by a full year. Not because the data disappeared — because no one else knew which queries to run, which exports to schedule, or which workarounds to apply when system A doesn't agree with system B.
One Person, 15,000 Students
Most districts have one or two people doing this work. One or two people handling data requests for 5,000, 15,000, sometimes 50,000 students. One or two people responsible for state reporting, federal compliance, ad hoc queries from every principal and department head, assessment data imports, SIS data quality, and whatever the superintendent needs for the meeting that got moved to tomorrow.
They're chronically under-resourced. When a district evaluates new technology, the data coordinator is rarely in the room. The purchasing decision gets made by cabinet-level administrators who will never log into the system. The implementation plan gets written by the IT department. And the data coordinator — the person who will actually use the tool every day, or more likely, build workarounds for everything it doesn't do — finds out about it after the contract is signed.
Then they're asked to make it work. With no additional staff. On top of everything they were already doing.
What They Actually Need
I've sat across from dozens of data coordinators over the past two years and asked the same question: what would actually help? The answers are remarkably consistent.
They don't need another dashboard. They already have dashboards — from the SIS, from the assessment platform, from the state, from the last vendor who promised a "single pane of glass." What they have is seven panes of glass, none of which agree with each other.
They don't need another login. They have enough logins. They don't need a tool that makes pretty charts for the superintendent. The superintendent already has someone who makes pretty charts. That someone is the data coordinator, and they'd rather not.
What they need is for the repetitive work to go away. The weekly attendance pulls that look exactly the same every week but still take 45 minutes because the export has to be reformatted. The monthly enrollment reconciliation where they compare the SIS count against the state system count, find the 23 discrepancies, and fix them one by one. The quarterly compliance reports that require pulling data from four systems, merging it in Excel, and praying the VLOOKUP doesn't break on a mismatched student ID.
They need that work automated — not because it's unimportant, but because it's mechanical. It follows the same steps every time. A human is doing it only because no one has built a system that does it reliably.
If the repetitive work were handled, data coordinators could spend their time on the analytical work that actually requires human judgment. Identifying attendance patterns that suggest a student needs intervention. Analyzing assessment data to figure out why third-grade reading scores dropped at two buildings but not the others. Helping principals understand what the data is telling them — and what it isn't.
That's the work they were hired to do. It's the work most of them rarely get to.
Our Design Principle
Every tool Arcline builds starts with one question: does this make the data coordinator's job easier? Not the superintendent's job. Not the board's job. The data coordinator's job. Because if the person closest to the data says it works, everyone downstream benefits. And if the data coordinator has to build workarounds to use it, we've failed — no matter how good the executive dashboard looks.
If the answer to that question isn't yes, we don't ship it.
