TL;DR:

The core system of record in education -- the student information system (SIS) -- is broken. Schools run all of their software on top of it, but most teachers and administrators avoid using their SIS as much as possible. Traditionally, the SIS has been a database with a UI, but we believe that the SIS of the future will be providing “compliance-as-a-service”, handling every administrative task schools have to deal with, so educators at every level can focus on optimizing instruction.

Demo

Automated Compliance 💫

By law, schools have to collect and report mountains of data. It takes large teams of people a ton of time to ingest, validate, audit, and report data to the government. They develop their own manual pipelines to try to improve these processes, but there’s no unified pipeline, and it often involves several rounds of manual auditing to make sure the data is accurate.

Even with all of these redundant checks, these are manual processes, and schools make mistakes. When the annual audit comes around, schools lose funding for every mistake - and it can come out to hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

Scout automates the entire school compliance pipeline, from data ingestion to internal audits to government reporting. Our AI agents use drip campaigns to remind parents and students to submit documents, we continuously monitor all data for compliance throughout the school year, and Scout’s end-to-end reporting features compress reporting from a month-long process to something that can be done in a few hours.

AI-powered outreach

One of the biggest time-sinks in compliance is that teachers need to constantly reach out to families for data and documents, track submissions in spreadsheets, continue to follow-up until everything’s been submitted, and then manually validate each document, starting the whole cycle again if something’s invalid. We’ve heard some teachers refer to themselves as “professional nags”.

Other industries that are outreach-heavy have already solved this problem. For example, HubSpot has solved this for sales by automating follow-ups until prospects respond.

Scout treats each student like a customer in a CRM: students moves through a variety of funnels, from annual tasks like enrollment and re-enrollment to daily tasks like tracking attendance or engagement with online curriculum providers. Scout’s built-in drip campaigns make sure students and parents complete tasks without teacher or administrator involvement, only flagging the students who need attention and removing the burden on schools to manually track all of these funnels.

Scout’s AI agents automatically reach out to parents and students via phone, email, text, and the Scout mobile app to get them to fill out forms, upload documents, mark excused absences, and more.

Right now, schools put multiple levels of compliance checks in place to make sure that submitted documents are valid. To reduce the number of humans that need to check over each document, Scout proactively scans every document for compliance on ingestion, highlighting exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it. With Scout, schools reduce the possibility for human errors while avoiding the back and forth that comes with invalid documentation.

24/7 internal audits

Throughout the course of the school year, Scout monitors every dimension of compliance, highlighting only the items that need attention. With Scout, schools can shift their mental model from checking every single document and database row for compliance to only looking at the ones that are out of compliance - saving as much as 95% of the time they spend on compliance tasks.

End-to-end government reporting

Throughout the school year, California schools need to report information to a number of state and federal bodies, including the California Department of Education (via a number of systems like CALPADS, PADC, and ConApp), and the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. These reports often take weeks to compile, because data errors aren’t discovered until submission, and understanding exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it is an extremely time-consuming process. Current SIS providers don’t report directly to the state, so schools are exporting CSVs, and their edits aren’t reflected in the SIS.

Scout manages the reporting process end-to-end with proactive error discovery, a step-by-step error resolution flow, and automated submission without leaving the page.

Our team 🤼

Noah (CEO)

• coding since 12 years old, started his first company at 17 selling licenses to a sneaker bot (500K ARR)
• first engineer at Slash (S21), where he worked for 3 years, bringing dozens of products and features from zero to one
• degrees from UMD in CS and education policy

Max (CTO)

• coding since 13 years old, early eng at a number of startups
• led a product/engineering team at TodayTix for 4 years
• CS degree from UCL

We met on the first day of high school in 2013, and we’ve been best friends ever since, hacking on side projects like sneaker bots throughout high school and college.

Our ask 🙏

If you know anyone who works at a school district or charter school in California, particularly if they oversee compliance/reporting/other administrative tasks, please send them this post or connect us!

If you’d like to see a demo of Scout, send me an email at noah@teachwithscout.com. Thanks!