Clarke County School District transforms operations with Zoho Analytics

The challenge

James Barlament, the Executive Director of the Department of Innovation, Strategy, and Governance, and Rachel Butts, the Director of Data and Research, wanted a solution that could power public-facing dashboards and serve as a centralized longitudinal data hub, bringing together students’ academic, behavioral, attendance, and assessment data over time.

Clarke County School District oversees 21 individual schools across the district. Each of these schools operates with its own leadership team and even a local school governance team that’s responsible for school-level decision-making. The district manages all student assessments and collects critical annual performance data instead of each school building its own reporting system.

During the pandemic, the district urgently needed a tool that:

• Tracked COVID-19 cases in schools
• Used data to inform school closure and reopening decisions
• Created public-facing dashboards for transparency

The absence of a flexible BI platform made rapid dashboard deployment difficult and created high operational pressure.

CCSD also had disconnected data systems. Student data such as assessments, attendance, behavior, grades, and enrollment existed in different places. Data was exported manually from the Student Information System (SIS), third-party assessment data required manual downloads, and files were managed through spreadsheets and shared drives. Though the data was available, it lived independently.

Teachers could see only current rosters. Historical, longitudinal student data like performance from kindergarten onward was not easy to find, and connecting these data points required manual effort or back-end coding. This resulted in limited visibility for teachers into a student’s full academic journey.

This scattered data system made it difficult for teachers to identify gaps in students’ performance and implement targeted interventions. They could not easily identify struggling students, and behavioral spikes like incidents by hour or day were harder to detect.

The existing information system also didn’t allow granular user-level filtering. To see longitudinal data, permissions for teachers would have exposed all student records. Teachers and principals lacked a secure way to view only the students relevant to them.

Initially, the district used a reporting tool tied to assessment systems: Renaissance Learning’s product, Illuminate DNA. But this tool was primarily designed for assessment reporting and was not a comprehensive BI tool. Reports had to be creatively manipulated and data from spreadsheets had to be manually injected into the system to generate usable reports. This required a lot of manual effort.

The district also tried spreadsheet-based consolidation. Google Sheets and Excel were used to store assessment data, combine datasets, and prepare reports. This also required a lot of manual effort to stitch the datasets.