This project began with the vision of several Colorado rural districts committed to redefining what success looked like in K-12 education for their communities. 

After four years of advocacy, those districts successfully convinced not just the State Board of Education, but also the Colorado legislature to support alternative accountability methods in the State of Colorado, with the passage of SB 19-204. This allowed them to use public-facing dashboards to articulate their vision of success to their communities, replacing the unified improvement planning process. This project was born in order to create the data infrastructure and reporting capabilities to meet that need. 

Our districts, however, were not content to stop with simply naming what success looked like for their communities and sharing aggregated reports that articulated that vision. They wanted to be able to use the same data to support teaching and learning activities. They wanted to make sure that the vision of success that they had co-created with their industry partners and broader community was reflected in every aspect of the education system, from board and accountability reporting, all the way down to what happened in the classroom. This led to the expansion of this project, where additional networks of districts, first in Colorado, and then in other states, began joining the work.  Each set of districts brought a new set of energy and focus to solving a specific problem of practice, building their own “tower” on top of our infrastructure. And each set of districts found opportunities to learn from and build on the work developed by others.

Today, we support data integrations with most traditional education data sources, including student information systems and a wide array of assessment providers. We are capable of using surveys to capture learning climate and learning dispositions. We are able to track 21st-century competencies to address the needs of local business communities, and we are developing support for the creation of Advanced Learning Plans, 504 plans, and READ Plans (early literacy). Finally, we will soon be able to support educators in grouping students to support real-time interventions and/or the tracking of out-of-school activities, reporting on how this work is impacting student measures of success.

Perhaps most importantly, we remain committed to being a non-profit grassroots organization, where what we build next is driven by our member districts and our technology is simply a way to support and enhance the work done every day by our amazing educators.