In just the past two decades, the edtech industry has fundamentally transformed how our learning institutions function. The advent of the student information system (SIS) ushered school districts into the digital age, antiquating pen-and-paper recordkeeping and making overstuffed file cabinets a thing of the past. On the instructional side, new learning management systems (LMSs) revolutionized how students were taught, assessed, and supported in the classroom.
There are more software solutions in our schools than ever before. Yet despite all of these new technologies, student success hasn’t necessarily scaled with it. In fact, eighth-grade math scores — an effective bellwether for edtech’s broader impact on K-12 schools — plateaued from 2022 to 2024 and decreased from 2019, according to data from The Nation’s Report Card.
The adoption of SISs and LMSs were paradigm shifts for the American education system, but they’re not enough. It’s time for the next leap forward. A new way to think about how we implement edtech in our schools, and a new way to approach student success.
The Missing Piece
It’s not just about the SIS and LMS. It’s about everything around them: all of the non-instructional processes and departments in a school that shape a student’s learning environment.
Billions of dollars in public education funding is spent on non-instructional processes, and yet K12 schools don’t have a true integrated system to manage all of it. The result is organizational inefficiency, headaches for teachers and administrators, and more interruptions in the classroom. It means more time trying to untie logistical knots, and less time for the student.
That’s why we built Cariina. To give leaders the tools they need to create organizationally excellent schools, and in turn, cultivate a 100% uninterrupted learning experience — an educational environment that fosters long-term student success.
An Entirely New Class of Software
Currently, most K12 schools rely on a mishmash of point solutions to handle their various organizational processes — one program for building maintenance, another for student transportation — if they’re using any digital solution at all.
These typically legacy-era, single-use programs aren’t connected, which forces administrators to juggle a laundry list of different logins. Data is siloed, a wealth of insights and analytics go untapped, and cross-departmental processes are hamstrung by access issues and logistical obstacles.
Cariina isn’t a point solution. It’s a platform that’s flexible enough to conduct nearly any workflow your school needs in its day-to-day functions. Through Cariina, schools can manage everything from finance and HR, to IT and inventory, to lesson plans and attendance, all of it connected in a single, unified knowledge center.
How It Works
The two fundamental building blocks of Cariina are Workflows and Boards. Together, these functionalities are powerful enough to support virtually any organizational use case you can dream up, yet user-friendly enough for admins, faculty, parents, and students to easily interact with.
Workflows
Workflows allow schools to easily manage processes that occur across different departments and user types. For example, a workflow for an upcoming field trip could be created where parents could digitally submit a signed permission slip for teachers to easily view and manage. Similarly, a workflow could be used for teachers to create help tickets to the IT department or submit requests to maintenance.
Boards
Boards let school leadership create simple, no-coding-required web pages, ultimately crafting a true knowledge center for the school. Administrators can control who can access what with permissions and even generate graphics from user-submitted data — say, the percentage of school-provided laptops currently in use.
Dashboard
Together, Workflows and Boards can create a command center for school leadership: a 10,000-foot-view of your entire, fully connected organization. This doesn’t just streamline and optimize processes — it uncovers insights at every organizational level. You can track metrics in real-time, discover hidden pain points, and put the data you’ve collected to work through robust, automated reporting.
Ready To Become Organizationally Excellent?
Just like how Cariina is a platform rather than a point solution, we're also a partner rather than a vendor. We'll help you quickly and easily configure Cariina's powerful tools to suit your school's unique organizational needs in just three days. Once you're set up, Cariina provides ongoing support and help, for as long as you need it. Let's get started – schedule a demo today.
