Over the past year, we talked to more than 40 superintendents. We asked each one the same question: "What's the first thing you look at when you get to your desk?"
Not a single one said their data platform.
Most said email. Some said their calendar. A few said they check the local news to see if their district made the headlines. The data that should be informing every decision they make — enrollment trends, attendance patterns, staffing gaps, budget variances — is sitting in six different dashboards that nobody opens until someone asks a hard question at a board meeting.
That gap between what districts know and what their leaders see every morning is the problem we set out to fix.
More Data, Less Awareness
Superintendents today have more data access than at any point in the history of public education. The average district runs a student information system, an assessment platform, an HR system, a finance system, and a transportation management tool — at minimum. Many run eight or ten. The data is there. It's being collected diligently, every day, by registrars and attendance clerks and HR coordinators who are doing exacting work.
But having data and having situational awareness are two different things.
Synthesizing everything into "here's what you need to know this morning" requires someone to manually pull reports from multiple systems, cross-reference the numbers, identify what's changed, determine what matters, and write it up in plain language. For most districts, that person doesn't exist. There's no chief data officer. There's no analytics team. There's a curriculum director who's good with spreadsheets and already has a full-time job.
New superintendents are especially exposed. They spend their first 6 to 12 months just learning what questions to ask — which buildings have chronic attendance problems, which budget lines tend to run over, which staffing gaps have been quietly compounding. By the time they've built that mental model, half their first year is gone. Every week without that context is a week where problems can grow unnoticed.
What We Built
Today we're releasing District Briefing. Every morning, Arcline generates a personalized, plain-English summary of what's happening in your district. Not a dashboard. Not a data dump. A 60-second read that tells you what changed overnight, what needs your attention, and what's trending in the wrong direction.
Think of it as the morning briefing that a well-staffed data team would prepare for you — except it's generated automatically from the live data in your connected systems, and it's ready when you are.
How It Works
Overnight, Arcline queries every data source your district has connected — attendance records, assessment results, HR vacancy data, budget actuals, transportation incident logs. It compares today's numbers against a rolling baseline built from your district's own historical patterns. That baseline matters: a 91% attendance rate means something different in January flu season than it does in September. District Briefing knows the difference.
When something deviates from the norm, it surfaces in your briefing. If 3rd grade chronic absence is up 12% compared to the same period last month, that's in your briefing. If a certified teaching position has been open for 30 days with no applicants, that's in your briefing. If winter MAP scores show a cohort dropping instead of climbing, that's in your briefing.
The summary is tailored to your role. A superintendent sees district-level trends and board-ready takeaways — the kind of information you need before a cabinet meeting or a community forum. A principal sees their building's data with school-level context — how their attendance compares to the district average, which grade levels are moving in the wrong direction, what staffing gaps are affecting their classrooms specifically.
Every item in the briefing links directly to the underlying Arcline query. You read the summary in 60 seconds. If something needs a deeper look, one click takes you to the full data. No re-creating the search. No figuring out which system to log into.
District Briefing is delivered to your inbox every morning and is always available inside the Arcline dashboard.
What a Briefing Looks Like
Here's an example of what a superintendent might see on a Thursday morning:
"Good morning. Here's your district snapshot for Thursday, February 20.
Attendance: District-wide attendance is at 91.4%, down 1.2 points from last week. Jefferson Elementary saw the largest single-school drop (87.3%, down from 93.1%). Flu-related absences are trending above seasonal average across all elementary buildings.
Staffing: Two certified teacher positions remain unfilled — 4th grade math at Lincoln Middle and special education at Roosevelt K-8. Both have been open 30+ days. Three long-term substitute assignments are currently active.
Assessment: Winter MAP results are in. 3rd grade reading proficiency improved 4 points district-wide, but Washington High's 9th grade math cohort dropped 6 points from fall. Detailed breakdowns are ready for your review."
That's 30 seconds of reading. It would have taken a data coordinator two hours to compile manually — pulling attendance from the SIS, cross-referencing HR vacancy reports, downloading MAP results, and writing it all up. Most mornings, it simply wouldn't get done.
Why This Matters
A superintendent who finds out about a suspension spike from a board member at a public meeting is operating blind. A principal who discovers a chronic absence trend from a state accountability report in March — when the pattern started in November — has lost four months of intervention time. These aren't hypothetical scenarios. We heard versions of them in nearly every superintendent conversation we had last year.
District Briefing means you walk into every meeting, every day, knowing what your data already knows. You stop being reactive. You stop getting surprised. The data your staff works hard to collect actually reaches the people who need it, in a form they can act on, at the moment it's most useful.
For new superintendents, the effect is even more pronounced. Instead of spending months building a mental model of your district's patterns — which schools run hot on absenteeism, which budget categories tend to overrun, where staffing churn concentrates — District Briefing gives you that context from day one. It compresses the learning curve from months to days. You're not starting from scratch. You're starting from a clear picture of what's actually happening.
Available Now
We built Arcline to turn district data into answers. District Briefing is the next step — turning answers into awareness, before you even have to ask the question.
District Briefing is available now for all Arcline districts at no additional cost. If your district is already on Arcline, your briefing is ready to activate — talk to your account contact or enable it in your notification settings. If you're not on Arcline yet and want to see what your morning briefing would look like, reach out at hello@arcline.com.
