From Chaos
to Clarity
How Beaumont USD transformed expanded learning operations — growing from 5 schools to 10 while cutting weekly reporting from hours to minutes.
A district outgrowing its systems
Beaumont Unified School District's expanded learning program grew from 5 schools serving 483 students to 10 schools serving over 1,231 students in just three years — while the city itself exploded from 11,000 to 75,000 residents. That growth created an operational crisis: data scattered across paper forms, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems; no real-time visibility into attendance or staffing; and a weekly reporting process that required a 5 AM start every Monday.
After an eight-month failed implementation with another vendor, Beaumont partnered with Attendly to build a single source of truth with native Aeries integration. The result: weekly reporting dropped from hours to two minutes, real-time visibility replaced guesswork, and frontline staff were empowered to own their data and make proactive decisions.
A community outgrowing its infrastructure
Beaumont is a city defined by growth. Twenty-three years ago, the population was roughly 11,000. Today it's approaching 75,000. That trajectory put extraordinary pressure on the school district: how to keep up with changing demographics, space needs, and the demand for services — including expanded learning programs that were suddenly expected to serve every elementary and middle school.
We experienced all the growing challenges that other growing districts do. How do we keep up with that? How do we keep up with the changing demographics? How do we keep up with the space needs?
Michael Griffin stepped into the Director role in July 2022 from six years as a site principal. School started 20 days later. He had zero staff. The district's expanded learning programs were, in his words, "a hodgepodge" — some sites ASES-funded at the lowest level, others parent-paid, creating inequities in both access and quality.
Data in Every Direction, Answers Nowhere
The operational picture was bleak. Parent registration required paper forms picked up at an office in a different city. Staff would manually type parent information into spreadsheets, then share those back and forth with district personnel. There was no way to answer basic questions in real time: How many kids are in the program right now? How many staff showed up today? What are our ratios?
One of our biggest conversations when we first started was, 'How many kids do we have in there? How many people came to work?' We didn't know.
Khassady Valdivia, Area Director for the Boys & Girls Club partnership, described the reporting burden: to produce a single weekly update, she had to begin work at 5:00 AM every Monday. If she needed four data points, she was downloading 40 separate reports, calculating ADA manually for each site, and entering results before the team arrived.
If I wanted to run the ADA for a site, I would have to download the ADA for one specific site, calculate what the ADA was for that week, get rid of that one and then download it for the next site. If I needed four pieces of information, I was downloading 40 reports.
A Failed First Attempt
The team's first attempt — a different attendance platform — lasted eight months before they pulled the plug. The system lacked integration with Aeries, the district's SIS, which meant staff were maintaining two separate systems of record. The platform produced reports, but they were just "another spreadsheet."
We hadn't been doing expanded learning for long enough to fit into the model that everyone else does. What we realized was that the information we were hoping to use just became another spreadsheet.
Five years of transformation
Click any milestone to explore the details
Finding the right partner
Michael first encountered Attendly at the Boost Conference, where Vikrant Duggal, Attendly's CEO, was describing a platform built specifically for California expanded learning programs with native SIS integration. The timing was critical: Beaumont was eight months into a failing implementation and actively looking for an alternative.
What differentiated Attendly was the approach. Rather than offering a fixed product and asking the district to conform, Attendly began by understanding Beaumont's specific operational needs — then built around them.
We really look for partnerships and not vendors. Vendors are great; they have services. But this work is about partnerships and the push and the growth that we can experience in a very short period of time.
Native Aeries Integration
The foundation was a direct sync with Aeries, Beaumont's SIS. Every night at 1:00 AM, Attendly pulls updated student, parent, and contact data. This eliminated paper forms entirely. A parent registers with their phone number or email, sees only eligible programs, selects one, acknowledges terms, and signs digitally. No forms. No data entry.
This also solved the emergency contact problem: when a district updates an authorized pickup person in Aeries, that change flows to Attendly within 24 hours. For same-day emergencies, staff can process a manual sign-out with ID verification, fully documented in the attendance record.
The Spreadsheet That Tells the Story
Rather than replacing the team's operational spreadsheet, Attendly focused on making it dramatically easier to populate. The master tracking document — which had grown from a simple grid to a sprawling matrix of ADA, enrollment, staffing ratios, waitlists, pickup times, and drop/add tracking — was the team's command center.
Today, the first four columns are populated directly from Attendly reports without downloading files or doing math. What previously required 40 report downloads and a 5:00 AM start now takes roughly two minutes.
The first four columns of this spreadsheet, I can literally just go into the reports on Attendly and I don't even have to download an Excel sheet or do any math. It takes me about two minutes.
Before and after Attendly
Side-by-side comparison across key operational areas
Proactive Staffing and Sub Placement
With structured pickup times and real-time enrollment data broken down by TK/Kinder and 1st–8th grade ratios, the team makes staffing decisions proactively. If a 3:00 PM dismissal frees up staff at one site, those people redirect to a later-releasing school five minutes away. Morning programs starting at 6:30 AM benefit from the same approach.
Waitlist Management at Scale
Beaumont routinely starts the year with 800+ students on waitlists. The philosophy: drop three, add three. With real-time tracking, site managers make enrollment decisions independently and the district demonstrates active waitlist movement to board members.
I used to walk into meetings and try to make them believe that we were doing things because I didn't have the best data to support it. Now I walk into meetings with school board members and I can just tell the story with the numbers.
Data Ownership Shifts Downstream
Perhaps the most meaningful change was cultural. In the early days, Michael owned the data and drove every conversation. Today, Boys & Girls Club frontline staff pull up the spreadsheet in meetings and brief him on what's happening. Site managers monitor their own ADA thresholds. The data went from a top-down accountability tool to a shared operational language.
It's not so much top-down, pound overhead. It's really been building from the ground up. Now they're coming into meetings and explaining to me what's going on with our program.
Growth and efficiency metrics
Interactive charts showing Beaumont's transformation
Program Growth: 2022–2025
Schools served, students enrolled, and staff deployed
Reporting Efficiency Transformation
Weekly data collection went from a multi-hour ordeal to a 2-minute task
Impact beyond the spreadsheet
Partners, not vendors
Both Michael and the Attendly team emphasize that this relationship works because it's structured as a partnership. Attendly invests time understanding Beaumont's specific context — the braided ASES and ELOP funding, the structured pickup times, the board policy adaptations — rather than asking the district to conform to a generic product.
From Attendly's side, the approach is proactive: studying what administrators are doing in the background, identifying where spreadsheets signal unmet needs, and building solutions before districts ask. When compliance requirements shift or new modules like attendance recovery become relevant, Attendly goes deep with one partner, learns the ins and outs, then brings that knowledge to the community.
We're trying to see things before our district partners see them. If we ever hear the word 'spreadsheet,' that's a good sign for us — because that means something is going wrong.
This extends to the third-party partnership. Although Attendly's contractual relationship is with the district, the team treats Boys & Girls Club staff as equal partners. Khassady works directly with Attendly's team to solve problems as they arise, without routing through the district.
Michael's standard for all partners is simple: if you work in Beaumont, you hold to Beaumont's standard, regardless of what name is on your shirt. That expectation has created alignment across district staff, Boys & Girls Club personnel, and technology partners — all operating from the same data, the same language, and the same commitment.
We don't rise to the level of our goals — we fall to the level of our systems. If your system is ineffective, you are never going to make it anywhere.
What's next
Beaumont and Attendly continue to push the program forward. Upcoming priorities include deploying the attendance recovery module to capture funding from existing tutoring and enrichment programs, launching an enhanced parent experience with program status and pickup notifications, exposing audit logs so districts can see full enrollment and attendance history with timestamps, and expanding the partnership model to additional vendors and program types.
The foundation of real-time, SIS-integrated data is now in place. The question is no longer "How many kids do we have?" — it's "How creative can we be with what we know?"