For schools, districts, colleges & education nonprofits
I taught for eight years. Now I fix the technology that made teaching harder.
Websites, accessibility, family communication, and workflow support for K-12 districts, independent and charter schools, colleges, and the nonprofits working alongside them. Ongoing support from someone who has actually been in the building.
You've probably lived at least half of this.
- The district site is fine, but every school has its own, and three of them haven't been updated since a principal left.
- Families get information through email, a text app, a paper folder, a Facebook group, and the marquee out front — and the ones who most need to hear it are the ones who miss it.
- Enrollment, field trip permissions, and free-and-reduced forms are PDFs that families print, sign, scan, and email to someone who types them into a system by hand.
- Half the documents on your site are scans. A screen reader treats a scan as a picture of nothing.
- Staff are already using AI daily and there's no policy, so everyone is guessing about what's allowed with student work and student data.
- Someone wants to buy an AI tool, and the review process is one person's gut feeling in a meeting.
- Your technology director is also the person who images Chromebooks, resets passwords, and runs the bell schedule software.
- Every proposal you get is priced for a district three times your size.
None of this is a competence problem. It's what happens when schools are asked to run enterprise-grade systems on a staffing model that never budgeted for it.
Who this is for.
Public school districts
Accessibility obligations, family communication, site consolidation, and getting paper processes online — usually alongside a technology team that's already stretched thin.
Independent and charter schools
Where the website is an enrollment tool, not a brochure, and there is frequently no internal technology staff at all.
Colleges and universities
Most often at the department, school, or office level — the work central IT can't reach for another two semesters.
Education nonprofits and out-of-school programs
After-school, tutoring, literacy, college access, enrichment. Program tracking, outcomes reporting for funders, volunteer management, and the systems that hold a small program together. Also see nonprofits.
The work, specifically.
- Websites
- District, school, and department sites that load fast, meet standards, and can be updated by a front-office coordinator rather than a developer.
- Accessibility
- WCAG 2.1 AA audits and remediation across sites, documents, and posted materials — including the PDF backlog nobody wants to open.
- Family communication
- Consolidating the channel sprawl, and making sure information actually reaches multilingual families rather than technically being available to them.
- Forms and workflow
- Enrollment, permissions, applications, requests, and approvals. Off paper without a six-figure platform.
- Data and reporting
- Getting your systems to agree, and producing numbers your board, your district office, or your funders can read.
- AI policy
- A short, readable acceptable-use policy staff will actually follow, plus a real review process for AI purchases.
- Practical AI
- Narrow and bounded. Translation support, drafting, intake triage. Nothing that touches student data without an explicit, documented decision.
- Vendor and procurement support
- Reviewing proposals, evaluating contracts, and translating vendor claims into what you're actually buying. Including telling you when the answer is "don't."
Where the rules actually stand.
The Department of Justice's 2024 Title II rule made WCAG 2.1 Level AA the enforceable standard for the web content and mobile apps of state and local government entities, which explicitly includes public school districts and public colleges and universities.
In April 2026, DOJ issued an interim final rule extending the compliance dates by one year — to April 26, 2027 for entities serving populations of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments. The requirements themselves did not change. Which date applies to you depends on the population your entity serves and how your district is structured, and that's worth confirming rather than assuming.
Two things the extension doesn't change:
- Title II's underlying nondiscrimination and effective-communication obligations still apply. Those supported accessibility complaints for years before a technical standard existed.
- The rule covers content you make available, not just content you build. Your SIS parent portal, your payment vendor, and your communication app are in scope even though someone else runs them.
On the tone of all this
A lot of vendors are still selling against an April 2026 deadline that moved. You have more time than you're being told — and the right use of it is building accessibility into how content gets published, rather than paying for a remediation sprint now and another one in 2029.
Independent schools aren't covered by Title II, but most adopt the same standard anyway, because it's what courts, families, and accreditors have come to expect.
Sized for a school budget, and aware of your calendar.
Engagements are structured as a retainer — often about half a day to a couple of days a week — rather than quoting each request. For schools that matters more than it does elsewhere, because your year isn't flat. August is chaos. October is quiet. Enrollment season, budget season, and the last week of school are their own animals.
An ongoing arrangement absorbs that. Some weeks are a redesign, some weeks are fixing a form the night before registration opens. You get a known cost and a known person instead of a quote for every request and a vendor who takes six days to answer in August.
This works best over a school year or longer, because that's the cycle the work actually follows.
I was a teacher for eight years.
Elementary and high school. ESL, English, History, robotics, coding, and a volleyball season. I've been the person handed a tool by someone who never asked how the work gets done, and I've been the person who couldn't update his own classroom page.
The ESL years are the ones I lean on most. If you're trying to reach families who don't read English — and you probably are — I've sat in those conferences and made those phone calls. Translation isn't a checkbox on a website. It's whether the message arrives.
After teaching I learned to build, and worked for the Department of Defense, then business intelligence and data security at a Fortune 500 telecom, then consulting for fintech and large corporate clients, then as the entire technology department at a startup. So the security and data-handling posture is real, not aspirational — which matters when the data in question is children's.
What you get is one person who understands both halves: how a school actually runs, and how the systems underneath it actually work.
Questions I get
We're a small district with one technology person. Are we too small?
That's a common fit. A day a week from someone senior often does more than a second full-time generalist hire, and it doesn't come with benefits, equipment, or a hiring cycle.
Will our technology director see this as a threat?
Done right it goes the other way — it's work off their queue, built to their standards, documented for their review. I'd want them on the first call rather than finding out afterward, and I'll say so.
How do you handle student data?
Carefully, and in writing. We define what's in scope before anything touches a system. Student data doesn't go into third-party tools or AI models without an explicit, documented decision — and if a vendor can't answer where the data lives, that's an answer.
Can you help us write an AI policy?
Yes, and it's one of the most useful small engagements available right now. A short policy staff will read beats a long one that lives in a shared drive.
Do we have to go out for bid?
Depends on your thresholds and board policy — you'll know better than I will. Many engagements this size sit under bid thresholds as ongoing professional services. If you do need to bid it, I'll help you write scope language that gets you honest, comparable proposals, whether or not I submit one.
Can you present to our board?
Yes, and I'd expect to. Explaining a technical tradeoff to people who have no reason to care about the technical part is genuinely the thing I'm best at, and I got that from teaching, not from consulting.
Tell me what's stuck.
A half-hour call, no pitch. One department, one school, or a whole district — most of my best engagements started as a single stubborn problem.