Florence City Schools is a roughly 4,500-student district in northwest Alabama, serving students across six schools in the Florence area. Like most districts their size, they don't have a dedicated data team. The work that larger districts spread across three or four people falls to one: the district's assessment coordinator. She handles state reporting, federal compliance, ad hoc data requests from principals, and — until recently — a daily attendance reporting process that consumed the first half of every morning.
The Morning Routine
Alabama requires daily attendance reporting to the Alabama State Department of Education through the state's reporting system. Every school district in the state submits attendance data for every enrolled student, every day. For a district the size of Florence City, that's roughly 4,500 student records that need to be accurate, formatted correctly, and uploaded before the state's window closes.
Before Arcline, the assessment coordinator's morning looked like this: arrive by 7:15. Log into the SIS. Run the attendance export for the previous day. Open the file and start cross-referencing it against the state's format requirements — field order, date formats, code mappings. Alabama uses specific attendance codes that don't always map one-to-one with the codes in the district's SIS. A student marked "present" in the SIS might need to be reported as a different code in the state system depending on whether they attended a full day or partial day.
Then come the discrepancies. A student marked present in the SIS but not showing up in any class period records — did they actually attend? A duplicate entry because a student transferred between schools mid-week and appears in both buildings' records. A student enrolled in the state system who hasn't been added to the SIS yet, or vice versa. Each discrepancy requires investigation: checking with the school's front office, looking up the student's enrollment history, sometimes calling a principal to confirm what happened.
Once the file is clean, she reformats it to the state's specifications, runs a validation check, fixes any remaining errors, and uploads it. On a good day, the whole process takes two hours. On a day with a lot of discrepancies — after a long weekend, after a holiday, during enrollment season in August and September — it takes three.
That's 15 hours a week. On one report.
What Changed
Florence City Schools came to Arcline in the spring of 2025. Their primary concern wasn't attendance reporting specifically — it was the volume of manual data work that left no time for anything else. Attendance reporting was the most visible symptom, but the underlying problem was that every data task in the district required pulling an export, cleaning it by hand, and reformatting it for whichever system or audience needed it.
We connected Arcline directly to Florence City's student information system. Attendance data flows from the SIS into Arcline's data layer continuously — not as a manual export, but as a live connection that updates as teachers and front office staff record attendance throughout the day.
Arcline's reconciliation engine handles the work the assessment coordinator used to do by hand. It maps the SIS attendance codes to the state's required codes automatically. It identifies discrepancies — partial-day attendance that needs manual classification, students enrolled in one system but not the other, duplicate records from mid-year transfers — and surfaces them as a daily exceptions list. And it formats the final file to the state's exact specifications.
Every morning, the assessment coordinator opens Arcline and sees a summary: total students reported, total present, total absent, and a short list of exceptions that need her review. Most days, there are three to five exceptions. She investigates those, makes the necessary corrections, and approves the submission. The upload to the state system happens automatically.
The whole process takes 15 to 20 minutes. On a bad day, 30.
What 15 Hours a Week Means
The math is straightforward. The assessment coordinator went from spending 15 hours a week on attendance reporting to spending roughly two. That's 13 hours back. Every week. For the entire school year.
But the more important change isn't the hours. It's what those hours are being used for now.
"I used to feel like I was drowning in data entry. I'd get to the end of the day and realize I hadn't looked at a single assessment report. Now I actually have time to dig into the data — which students are falling behind, where the patterns are. That's the work I wanted to do when I took this job."
— Assessment Coordinator, Florence City Schools
Since reclaiming that time, the assessment coordinator has been able to take on work that simply wasn't possible before. She built a chronic absenteeism early warning report that flags students who are trending toward the 10% threshold before they cross it — something the principals had been asking for but she'd never had time to create. She's running quarterly assessment trend analyses that break down proficiency by grade level, subject, and student subgroup, giving principals data they can actually act on instead of a flat district average. She's working with the Title I coordinator on a services audit to make sure the students who qualify are actually receiving support.
None of that work is new in concept. The assessment coordinator knew it needed to be done. She just couldn't get to it when attendance reporting consumed every morning until 10 a.m.
The Discrepancy Problem
One detail that gets lost in conversations about automation: the discrepancies didn't go away. Students still transfer mid-week. Teachers still occasionally forget to submit attendance. The SIS and the state system still disagree about enrollment dates. Those are human and system issues that no software can eliminate.
What changed is how the discrepancies surface. Before Arcline, the assessment coordinator discovered problems by staring at a spreadsheet and noticing that a row didn't look right. That's error-prone. When you're cross-referencing 4,500 records by hand, you miss things. You miss them more often on Fridays. You miss them more often in September when enrollment changes are happening daily.
Now, discrepancies are detected automatically and presented as a list. The coordinator isn't searching for problems. She's reviewing a set of identified problems and deciding how to resolve them. That's a fundamentally different cognitive task — and it's one that plays to her actual expertise instead of her tolerance for tedium.
The Work They Were Hired to Do
Automation in education gets talked about in abstract terms — efficiency gains, time savings, modernization. Those words are accurate but they miss the point. The point is that Florence City Schools has a talented assessment coordinator who spent three years doing data entry because the systems didn't talk to each other. Now they do. And she can do her actual job.
Automation isn't about replacing people. It's about freeing them to do the work they were hired to do.