Shannon Raines

The 2026-27 school year is underway, and your Student Information System (SIS) is already carrying the load: attendance, schedules, grades, fall count day, and a year's worth of family contact updates. Behind all that daily work is a question most districts ask only after something breaks: could we get our data back? An unexpected outage ... Read more

Each fall, California school districts take on one of their most critical data tasks: CALPADS Fall 1 reporting. This submission captures student enrollment, demographics, and program participation as of Census Day, the first Wednesday in October, which falls on October 7, 2026 this year. That data directly drives funding, equity reporting, and accountability. Completing Fall ... Read more

On June 29, 2026, Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 122 as part of the 2026-27 state budget package. Although the legislation drew relatively little attention in education circles at the time, it will begin appearing on district software invoices on January 1, 2027. For school business officials and technology directors who are already planning around ... Read more

The difference between a national Student Information System vendor and a California-built one shows up less in the software and more in the support behind it: time zone overlap with your working hours, whether the person answering already knows what CALPADS Fall 1 means, how many handoffs sit between your ticket and a developer, and ... Read more

Attendance is still the clearest early-warning signal a district has. It is also the one that has been hardest to restore. Chronic absenteeism, missing 10% or more of enrolled school days, roughly 18 days in a typical year, has come down from its pandemic peak, but it has not gone away. National rates rose from ... Read more

For school districts across California, meeting CALPADS requirements is not just a task, it's a critical responsibility. Accurate student data reporting drives state funding, feeds accountability calculations, and determines whether your district shows up correctly in state and federal reporting. But CALPADS has changed meaningfully in the past two years. The End-of-Year submissions were consolidated, ... Read more

Good education is never a one-person job. It takes a lot of moving parts, and one of the most important is the communication running between parents and teachers. When the two work together, students do better. The catch is that building that connection, and keeping it alive, is hard in a world where everyone is ... Read more

By the time a district is comparing Student Information Systems in earnest, it has usually worked through the questions that matter most: whether the system handles state reporting cleanly, how it manages scheduling and gradebooks, what the family portal offers, and how support responds when something breaks. Then, somewhere in the process, a narrower question ... Read more

Teachers carry an enormous amount. They shape how students think and, on their best days, turn a roomful of distracted learners into one genuinely curious about the material in front of them. The work is demanding. It cannot be sustained on goodwill alone. Teachers need what professionals in any field need: room to grow, time ... Read more

Your Student Information System spends most of the year out of sight. Then rollover arrives, and everything inside it shifts at the same moment. Students move up a grade. Seniors graduate and drop off the active rosters. Schedules wipe and rebuild. A fresh reporting year opens. And the whole of last year's data has to ... Read more