Everything a team learns the expensive way about shipping software into US K-12. Rostering that survives August, a privacy review you can pass, accessibility with a deadline on it, and the parts of the job nobody writes down.
Teachers decide whether they want your product. Four other people decide whether it ships. The five gates they own, and what each one costs.
Five people decide, three budgets are allowed to pay, and the school year sets your roadmap whether you like it or not. A field guide for teams new to US K-12.
A school is not a slightly unusual SaaS tenant. Five schema decisions that are cheap today and cost a quarter to reverse once you are in twelve districts.
The fields that carry the weight, the ones that lie, and the endpoints nobody fills in. A working guide to implementing a OneRoster consumer that survives September.
Five routes carry district data to your product, the district controls the tap, and you never get all of it at once. How each one fails.
It looks like a nightly ETL job. It is closer to a replication protocol against a source you cannot lock, judged by a teacher at 08:15.
How a child actually signs in, why the same student arrives through four different doors, and what your tool has to do when the launch carries no name at all.
The most common integration complaint in K-12 is that grades are not showing up. It is almost never an outage. Here are the four places the score actually went.
FERPA is not a checkbox in a security questionnaire. It is a set of constraints on what your system may do with data it holds, and several of them are load bearing.
School-authorised consent is narrower than teams assume, indefinite retention is over, and your wellbeing survey may legally need an opt-out.
A hundred state student privacy statutes sit on the federal floor. Only five things actually vary, and all five belong in a config table.
A district review is a person with a spreadsheet deciding whether to recommend you. What they ask, what the frameworks mean, and what to have ready.
The DOJ put dates on WCAG for public entities. What that changes for simulations, graphs and rendered maths, and why an honest conformance report wins.
A four year old Chromebook, one access point serving thirty simultaneous loads, a managed profile that blocks your extension, and nine minutes until the bell.
Tell us what you're building. We'll identify the hard parts before they become late surprises.