Smarter Data, Better Schools
Each year, K–12 education leaders make critical decisions about how to allocate funding, staff, and other resources across schools and districts. When made well, these decisions can strengthen student learning and help systems meet their goals. Yet most finance and human resource systems are designed for compliance and reporting, not for planning. As a result, leaders often lack timely, decision‑ready information.
Leaders in schools must make hard choices with limited resources. They need simple, high-impact data to guide those choices. Right now, most reporting systems don’t deliver it. That’s why this study matters. We’re testing whether AI can offer a new scalable and efficient way to get those insights.
– Chris Brooks, Project Director
AIR is partnering with the Clark County School District (CCSD) in Nevada to address this challenge. The project aims to better align the data leaders receive with the information they need to make informed decisions.
To do this, the team is testing how artificial intelligence (AI) can leverage existing district finance and human resource data to generate meaningful metrics that support staffing, budgeting, and resource allocation decisions.
This rapid-cycle development project will:
- Produce a new set of decision-useful indicators for district and school leaders;
- Develop AI-informed tools that help CCSD generate and use these indicators in its 2027–28 budgeting process; and
- Align the new indicators with state resource and financial reporting requirements.
Next steps
The study team is developing a framework that describes how school, district, and state leaders make resource decisions. The team will share lessons learned and demonstrate how the framework reflects the real‑world challenges education leaders face.
