Analyze the Data

Good governance depends on understanding the facts behind the decisions. Academic performance, financial trends, staffing, contracts, and other district information can be complex, but they should not be difficult for the public to access or understand.

Serving on the School Board has reinforced for me how important good information is to good decision-making. Board members are regularly asked to evaluate complicated issues involving millions of dollars, thousands of students and employees, long-term commitments, and competing priorities. The information needed to make those decisions is often spread across audits, contracts, state reports, budgets, enrollment data, and other public records. Understanding what those records are really telling us sometimes requires deeper analysis than a single report or presentation can provide.

Over the course of my tenure, I have developed a number of tools to help me analyze that information more efficiently and at greater scale. As those tools became more useful to me, I realized the same analysis could also be valuable to families, employees, taxpayers, and community leaders. That is why I have decided to make many of them available here.

These tools are not intended to tell anyone what to think, and they are not perfect. Their purpose is to organize public information into clearer, interactive comparisons that make it easier to understand the facts, identify trends, and ask better questions. My hope is that they provide greater insight into both how our schools are performing and the difficult decisions the School Board is regularly required to make.

Data by itself is not the goal. The goal is information that can be understood and used. Better information leads to more informed discussion, more meaningful questions, and better-educated decisions in the boardroom and throughout our community.