“I would have loved to have something like this when I was a Dean of Students”

As a member of the Technical Support Team at Veracross, I spend my days researching, troubleshooting, and resolving issues for the customers we serve. I am fueled by a deep desire to learn and master new things so I can help and serve others; that same instinct is what made me want to start building the moment I was given the chance to use VC Studio. 

I have always enjoyed building things that others could use and enjoy: our kitchen table, a mini waterfall in our backyard, a website for a small business or non-profit, a results and record-keeping app for my kids’ track and field team. This time, with VC Studio as my tool, I wanted to build an interactive tool for managing school data that felt more like an app.

The same data issue in two very different schools 

Earlier in my career, I served on the Early Alert retention committee at a college for 8 years. We were a committed team drawn from Residence Life, Student Affairs, the Counseling Center, Academic Advising, and Academic Support. We sought to care for the whole person, but the academic indicators were usually what raised the first signal. Our chairperson had done an excellent job assembling a list of leading indicators; the challenge was that we often had to wait for a faculty member to bring a case to our attention, after a student had already missed multiple classes or failed quizzes and exams. The data was in the system, or in the faculty’s own observations, but it would not always surface in time, and that delayed intervention. 

When I moved to an independent school as the Dean of Students for grades 7-12, I ran into the same issue in a different context. Across 16 years and two very different schools, the gap was the same: the data we needed to help a student was usually already in the system. The challenge was timing and surfacing. 

My former experience with schools made the difference when iterating with AI 

In addition to my role at Veracross, I consult as a product manager and visual designer and it’s in this context that I, like so many of us, have been learning to build with AI tools. That experience has shown me that iterating through conversation produces something better than any single perfect prompt could. Iteration is also how you refine the design and put the user’s experience first. 

As I thought about VC Studio, I could see how all three threads fit together. The retention committee had taught me which early signals matter. My years as a Dean of Students had shown me what those signals look like on the ground, and what a staff member actually needs to see in the middle of a busy day. And the product-design work had taught me how to build alongside an AI tool, shaping it through conversation. The educator in me knew what to ask for; the designer in me knew how to draw it out of the tool. 

Building the Beacon Early Alert dashboard 

My first prompt was structured with a clear objective: design a comprehensive dashboard for a Dean of Students or Assistant Principal that moves a school from reactive management to proactive intervention by surfacing early warning signs across attendance and academic performance. VC Studio produced some excellent high-level views, and I immediately wanted to go deeper into individual student details. Because VC Studio is built on Veracross’s context intelligence (20 years of accumulated knowledge about how independent schools structure their data), I did not have to teach it our terminology; I could spend my time on the harder questions instead.

The hardest and most interesting of those questions was the Watchlist and the scoring behind it. I wanted a Composite Priority Score that captured two things at once: students already in chronic trouble, and students accelerating downward right now. We ended up with a two-part score that balances status (current grades, attendance, and missing work) with volatility (five proactive signals that fire when something is changing in real time). Together, they catch what either one misses alone.

From there, I spent time refining the layout and design: making every chart and graph clickable for more detail and filtering, tuning the scoring to rank risk accurately, and asking VC Studio for recommendations, then weighing its assessments against my own. Through every pass I kept asking two questions: what does this visualization need to communicate to a school staff member in the middle of a busy day, and what will they actually do with the information once they see it? 

The result, the Beacon Early Alert dashboard, offers different altitudes for viewing data. At the school level, it shows leaders the patterns: risk-tier distributions broken out by grade, attendance trends across the year, and absence heatmaps by day and class period. At the student level, it surfaces individual signals: a Watchlist ranked by composite score, a full Student Profile with quarter-by-quarter grades and assignment history, and a dedicated Early Warning Signals view that highlights students showing multiple leading indicators. After reviewing the dashboard extensively, I asked VC Studio to help me build a guide, so users could understand the tabs, the scoring, and how to put the dashboard to work. 

Schools need clear, accurate answers to their questions, and now we have VC Studio to help them.

VC Studio is built around the idea of asking bigger questions, and the question I came in with was the one I had been asking for 16 years. The framework, the thresholds, the weights, the signals, the views: every one of them was a design decision I made because I came in with a plan and then refined it conversationally with the tool. 

The questions schools have always asked have not changed: who is struggling, who has not been seen, who could use intervention or encouragement. They are the same questions our committee was asking in 2011. What is new is that the data can be displayed, refined, and surfaced as a working dashboard in the space of a conversation. The tool to see students sooner is finally within reach of the people who have always known what to look for.

I would have loved a tool like this when I was a Dean of Students. The teachers, advisors, and staff already doing this work would have had a better view of our students than they could ever assemble by hand.