It's Monday morning. A director of data and accountability at a mid-size district sits down and opens five browser tabs: PowerSchool for enrollment and demographics, iReady for diagnostic assessment results, Munis for budget and expenditure data, the district's HR platform for staffing records, and their transportation software for routing and ridership. By 9 AM, she's exported four CSV files and is waiting on a fifth that keeps timing out.
By Friday, she'll have spent 15 or more hours getting data into a format where basic comparisons are possible. Not analyzing it — just getting it to a point where analysis could begin.
This is the week. Every week.
The Real Number
Based on our work with districts across six states, the average 10,000-student district spends north of 400 staff hours per year on manual data reconciliation — exporting, cleaning, reformatting, and cross-referencing information across disconnected systems. At average administrator and coordinator salaries, that represents $25,000 to $40,000 in labor annually. And that figure only captures the time. It doesn't account for the errors introduced during manual transfers, the reporting deadlines missed because someone was still waiting on a data pull, or the decisions deferred because nobody could get a clean answer fast enough.
Four hundred hours is ten full work weeks. That's a quarter of someone's year spent not on strategy, not on students, not on the work they were hired to do — but on copying and pasting between systems that were never built to coexist.
Name the Systems
Districts don't choose fragmentation. They inherit it. Each system was adopted to solve a real problem, usually well:
- Student Information Systems — PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward — manage enrollment, attendance, demographics, and grades. They're the backbone of daily operations.
- Assessment platforms — iReady, NWEA MAP, Renaissance Star — track student performance on diagnostics and benchmarks. They generate the data that's supposed to drive instructional decisions.
- Finance systems — Munis, Tyler Technologies — handle budgeting, purchasing, and expenditure tracking. They're where funding allocations live.
- HR platforms manage staffing, certifications, and payroll.
- Transportation, food service, special education case management — each with its own database, its own login, its own export format.
These systems were built by different vendors, at different times, for different purposes. They weren't designed to talk to each other. Most don't offer APIs. The ones that do often charge extra for access or limit what data can be pulled. So districts end up as the integration layer — with human beings doing the work that software should handle.
What Fragmentation Actually Costs
Staff time is the visible cost. The less visible costs are the ones that compound.
Compliance risk in federal and state reporting
ESSA reporting requires districts to disaggregate student performance data by subgroup, match it against demographic and program participation data, and submit it accurately and on time. When that data lives in three different systems, every handoff is a chance for error. A mismatched student ID between the SIS and the assessment platform means a student's scores don't get counted. A lag between HR and finance means a Title II expenditure gets reported under the wrong fund code. These aren't hypothetical — they're the kinds of findings that show up in state audits and monitoring visits.
Delayed identification of students who need help
If a student's attendance data lives in the SIS, their assessment scores live in iReady, and their discipline records live in a separate behavior management system, no single person can see the full picture without pulling data from all three. A student who's chronically absent, declining in reading, and accumulating office referrals fits every definition of at-risk — but if those signals live in different databases, the pattern doesn't surface until someone manually assembles it. By then, it's March.
Inability to answer board and community questions in real time
When a board member asks "How are our Title I schools performing compared to last year?" the honest answer in most districts is "I can get you that by next week." Not because the data doesn't exist, but because answering the question requires pulling enrollment data from one system, assessment data from another, and Title I school designations from a third. The answer is sitting in the district's data. It's just scattered across five different filing cabinets, and nobody has the key to all of them at once.
Funding left on the table
Title I, Title II, Title III, IDEA, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, E-Rate — every federal funding stream has its own eligibility requirements, and those requirements depend on data that typically spans multiple systems. When eligibility data isn't aggregated, districts miss funding they qualify for. Not because they don't care, but because the data necessary to identify the opportunity doesn't exist in any one place.
What the Fix Actually Looks Like
The instinct is to buy another dashboard. Districts have been sold dashboards for fifteen years. The problem is that a dashboard is only as good as the data feeding it — and if that data is still being manually exported, cleaned, and uploaded, the dashboard is just a prettier version of the same broken process.
The fix isn't another visualization layer on top of existing systems. It's a data layer that connects them — that pulls directly from the SIS, the assessment platform, the finance system, and everything else, normalizes the data into a common structure, and makes it queryable without requiring anyone to export a CSV or build a pivot table.
That's what we're building at Arcline. Not a replacement for the systems districts already use, but the connective layer between them. So the director of data who currently spends her Mondays exporting files can spend them answering questions instead. So the federal programs coordinator can see funding eligibility in real time instead of reconstructing it from three spreadsheets once a year.
Districts collect extraordinary amounts of data — more than most people outside education realize. Registrars, counselors, teachers, data clerks, and front-office staff enter information into these systems every single day. That data deserves to work as hard as the people who collect it.
