Case Study · K–12 Data Infrastructure
A district-owned data platform
How SJ Consultants partnered with Ukiah Unified to build a data platform which turns requests that once took weeks into answers available in minutes.
Client
Ukiah Unified School District
Location
Mendocino County, California
Scale
~5,800 students · 12 schools
Timeline
Nov 2025 – present · Year 2
Solution
Snowflake warehouse + analytics portal
8
production dashboards
Weeks → Minutes
to a complex, multi-source answer
100%
district-owned stack
The Challenge
The situation every district knows too well
Ukiah Unified had plenty of data — it was just scattered everywhere. Attendance lived in Aeries. Interim scores sat in Renaissance STAR and Acadience. State results came through CAASPP and ELPAC. Survey responses were split across Google Forms and Qualtrics. Discipline records, enrollment figures, and program participation all existed somewhere in the ecosystem.
The catch: turning any of it into a usable format ran through one person — the district’s sole data analyst, who also managed state reporting and administered Aeries. Every request from the board, from site principals, from the Superintendent’s office funneled through that single role. Query Aeries, export to a spreadsheet, run VLOOKUPs to merge in assessment data, build a pivot table, format it for the audience, deliver. A single complex request could take two weeks.
Assistant Superintendent Katie Sommer found herself pulling data on nights and weekends instead of leading strategic work. Superintendent Deb described the tension plainly: the district had great access to data — after someone spent hours assembling it — but what leadership needed was data to make decisions in real time.
“
The biggest challenge we had was having data in multiple systems. The systems all had different ways of accessing and reporting the data. Being able to easily pull data by student groups was challenging, and if we wanted to go further with data analysis, we had to re-pull all the data, which sometimes could take weeks.
Katie Sommer · Assistant Superintendent, UUSD
Only about 10% of UUSD’s 45 site leaders could independently access and analyze their own data. The rest waited — and while they waited, the questions that mattered went unanswered. Is the tutoring program working? Are chronically absent students improving? How are Latino English Learners performing compared to Latino English Only students? Each answer required merging four or five sources by hand, and by the time anyone assembled it, the momentum had stalled.
A previous vendor had delivered a dashboard, but it produced static views that needed manual updates, offered no drill-down, and showed a single snapshot with no way to compare across years. Board follow-up questions meant starting over from scratch — and annual price increases of 10% or more compounded the frustration.
~10%
of 45 site leaders could analyze their own data unaided
2 weeks
to fulfill a single complex, multi-system request
10%+
annual price increases from the prior vendor’s static dashboard
The Solution
What SJ Consultants built
SJ Consultants partnered with UUSD in November 2025 to design and deploy two interconnected systems — the infrastructure underneath, and the portal on top of it. The district renewed and expanded the engagement into a second year.
1
A centralized data warehouse on Snowflake
Rather than asking staff to manually merge exports, the warehouse pulls from Aeries, CAASPP, ELPAC, Renaissance STAR, Acadience, and survey instruments automatically, every day. SJ backfilled data through the 2018–19 school year, enabling multi-year trend analysis for the first time. Every table is FERPA-compliant — and UUSD owns the entire stack.
Layer 1 · Raw
Source records preserved exactly as they arrive
Layer 2 · Cleaned
Standardized and reconciled across systems
Layer 3 · Modeled
Business logic applied, analytics-ready tables
2
A custom analytics portal built for educators
On top of the warehouse sits a web portal (live at uusd.districtanalytics.io) that puts data directly in the hands of the people who need it. Eight production dashboards each support drill-down from a district-wide summary to an individual student, filterable by school, grade, demographic subgroup, and intersecting categories like Latino English Learner or male foster youth.
Attendance
Grades
Enrollment
Surveys
Discipline
State Assessments
Interim Assessments
Transcripts
LCAP Goals & Metrics
AI chat assistant
Staff ask in plain English — “attendance rates for 3rd graders at Oak Manor who scored below benchmark on STAR” — and get answers pulled straight from the warehouse.
Report builder
Principals and directors pick their own columns, filters, and student groups to build custom views on the fly — no new request to the central office.
37
Every accountability metric, in one live view
The LCAP suite is in production. All 37 state-mandated accountability metrics now sit in a single place, updated from the warehouse — replacing one of the most time-consuming manual processes in any California district’s annual cycle. UUSD used it to run a real planning session in its first month live.
Because the portal surfaces student-level data, security was designed into every layer. Access is role-scoped, and what is enforced today is deliberately conservative:
District administrator
Full district view, all schools and subgroups
Analyst
Full access plus the underlying modeled tables
Principal
Scoped to their own site
Counselor
Scoped to their own caseload
Sensitive fields like free- and reduced-price lunch status are restricted to authorized users, and every access event is logged for auditing. Teacher-level access is the last role getting established: the section-level roster and compound filtering are already modeled in the warehouse, and teachers are intentionally excluded from non-section tables until the district signs off on the FERPA scope.
Why It Lasts
Designed around districts’ real problems
The technology is only as valuable as the decisions behind it. What separates this from the dashboard products Ukiah Unified utilized in the past comes down to four deliberate choices.
01
Ownership
UUSD owns everything — the warehouse, the dashboards, the portal access, the historical data. If the engagement ended tomorrow, the district would keep the complete, functioning system. For leaders who have watched data disappear when a vendor contract expired, that changes the entire calculus of the investment.
02
Automated Data Refreshes
Ukiah Unified’s previous Looker Studio dashboards only updated when district staff refreshed the spreadsheets behind them. This meant pulling data from each source system by hand, then transforming, cleaning, and reformatting it before anything on screen would change. Hours of manual entry stood between a question and a current answer. The new infrastructure syncs from the source systems nightly, so dashboards and reports are already up to date when someone opens them.
03
Speed to insight, speed to action
When a board member asks a follow-up question during a meeting, the answer is available in the room. When a principal wants to know which students are chronically absent, declining on interim assessments, and enrolled in a specific intervention, that compound question takes minutes instead of weeks.
04
Capacity over dependency
Before this project, roughly 10% of 45 site leaders could pull and analyze their own data; everyone else submitted a request and waited. Site-scoped access for principals and caseload-scoped access for counselors are now live, and SJ built training into the rollout so site leaders develop real fluency rather than a new dependency on an outside firm.
Math the district can check against its own filings
For a district that had been handed a vendor’s black box, the strongest trust argument is reproducibility. The platform’s accountability metrics reconcile against UUSD’s own published numbers.
±0.5 pts
Metric 1.3 reconciles to CDE’s published ACGR within 0.5 percentage points
Validated
Metric 1.6 checked directly against the district’s published LCAP
95.8%
A–G readiness agreement with Aeries Analytics
The System In Use
A planning day built on live data
Capability is not the same as use. In September, UUSD’s guiding coalition spent a full day planning against the LCAP metrics inside the platform. The all-metrics view was printed as priority mats on ledger paper — one per goal area — and teams worked through them in a jigsaw activity, each group taking a set of metrics before rotating.
The day funneled deliberately: from the district-wide view of all 37 metrics, down to the handful of priority areas each team would own. Katie Sommer is now repeating the session with every principal in the district.
“
Of the kids with Ds and Fs, what did their attendance look like? … What you just did would take us hours. And it would take Jackie doing it.
Katie Sommer · Assistant Superintendent, UUSD
Step 1
All 37 metrics reviewed together, district-wide
Step 2
Jigsaw rotation across printed priority mats
Step 3
Each team leaves owning specific priority areas
Year Two
What came next
UUSD renewed and expanded the engagement for a second year. For a district evaluating a data partner, that decision is the review that matters.
Transcripts and graduation readiness
Course history and A–G progress joined to enrollment, making off-track students visible early enough to intervene.
The full LCAP suite
All 37 accountability metrics in production, with goals and metrics dashboards built for board and planning use.
Role-scoped access rollout
Site-scoped access for principals and caseload-scoped access for counselors, moving the platform past the central office.
Survey administration
Survey collection and reporting brought into the same pipeline, ending the Google Forms and Qualtrics split.
Board report automation
Recurring board reporting generated from the warehouse instead of rebuilt by hand each cycle.
Next: teacher access
Section-level scoping is modeled and waiting on the district’s FERPA sign-off — the last mile of the self-service goal.
Outcomes
What changed — and what compounds
8
production dashboards in daily use
37
LCAP accountability metrics, live
2018–19
history backfilled for trend analysis
Weeks → Min
to a complex, multi-source answer
~5,800
students across 12 schools served
100%
of the stack owned by the district
What changed immediately is speed. Data questions that once required weeks of manual assembly across multiple systems can now be explored in a single session. When a board member asks a follow-up about tutoring effectiveness by subgroup, the answer is available in the room.
The deeper shift is the one that compounds. UUSD’s data operations no longer depend on a single person’s institutional knowledge, and the infrastructure is now in place to measure whether interventions are working.
Equity work got more precise, not just more visible. At the community’s request, the platform surfaces Native American students for the district’s Title VI obligations — students whose identification is otherwise absorbed into a two-or-more-races category and effectively disappears from subgroup reporting. Getting that count right is the kind of thing a district cannot do with a spreadsheet export.
“
I would have never been able to share this data in this format so quickly.
Katie Sommer · Assistant Superintendent
“
It was pretty cool to be able to have the data and not me building a bunch of charts.
Katie Sommer · Assistant Superintendent