One trusted source for a district's attendance, discipline, and school-improvement data.

The district runs schools for tens of thousands of students and employs thousands of staff, and its leaders needed to see attendance, discipline, and school-improvement measures the same way from the district office down to a single school. The data existed, spread across a student information system, an ERP, assessment platforms, and surveys, but every dashboard came from a previous vendor on that vendor's terms, and a survey platform was costing the district more than it returned.

The constraint was the budget that already existed. There was no appetite for a seven-figure per-user licensing path, and no room for a platform the district's own developers could not run after the engagement.

I owned the architecture and wrote the contracted design: a district enterprise data warehouse on Azure, with the student information system flowing through Azure Data Factory into Azure SQL (vCore, elastic pool), star-schema data marts underneath, and Power BI on top. The scope document, the technical platform recommendation, the physical data model with DDL, and the server build document all came from the same design.

Security was decided once and inherited everywhere: encryption at rest, keys in Azure Key Vault, private endpoints for both users and BI, least-privilege database roles, and row-level access driven from the district's Active Directory groups rather than a security model of our own. The Power BI workspaces mirror that, with admin, contributor, and viewer groups across development, QA, and production, and a filtering model that works for the district, a group of schools, or one school.

The Azure components were sized to the actual load so the dashboards could ship inside the budget the district already had.