How Dora Schools Proved Small Districts Deserve Great Systems

Outcomes:

"I thought we were doing okay. But once you see the other side, you can't go back. You can't recreate what we're doing on Cariina with paper and spreadsheets. I don't know how we survived without it."

Brandon Hays

Superintendent, Dora Schools

The Challenge

Small District. No Margin for Error.

Dora, New Mexico is a tight-knit rural community where the school and the town are essentially one. Superintendent Hays grew up in Dora, walked the hallways for thirteen years as a student, built a career, and came back to lead the school that raised him.

At just 220 students and 45 staff, Dora runs lean by design. The Superintendent, the Principal, and the Business Manager are the entire administrative team. There is no central office buffer. When something slips, everyone feels it, and sometimes, a board member hears about it before the Superintendent does.

Before Cariina, work moved through Dora on paper, email, and goodwill. Hays was personally handling around 15 paper processes a day. When maintenance requests came in as hallway conversations, they disappeared just as easily. Board members occasionally surfaced complaints in meetings that Hays was hearing about for the first time, because in a small town, a frustrated teacher doesn't always go to the Superintendent. Sometimes they go to whoever they ran into at the grocery store.Onboarding new staff exposed a similar gap. There was no central place to direct anyone.There was no system, just institutional memory, and it walked out the door every time someone left.

The Solution

Building One Place for Everything in the District

Dora didn't adopt Cariina to go paperless. They adopted it because they needed a place where work could start, move, and finish without getting lost.

The team built their existing processes directly into the platform: purchase approvals, maintenance and IT tickets, leave and substitute requests, student intervention tracking, fuel logs, pre-trip transportation forms and more. 

Today, Dora's five most-used workflows generate hundreds of touchpoints every month and tell the story of a district.

• Student Intervention

• Staff Leave Requests

• Nurse Passes

• Purchase Requisitions

• Transportation Fuel Logs

Everything that used to live in email threads and hallway conversations now moves through a defined path, notifies the right people automatically, and creates a documented record.

The Impact

A Day Back. Every Week.

For Hays, the ROI isn't just in the hours or the audit trails. It's in knowing that when he steps away — really steps away — the district doesn't hold its breath. Fridays used to be catch-up days for Hays, clearing the week's email backlog. Now his Fridays are protected for grant writing, contractor meetings, and strategic district planning.

Zero Board Surprises

Board members used to surface complaints Hays was hearing about for the first time — three or four times a year. After Cariina: zero. Every open ticket is visible on his executive dashboard, and nothing becomes a board meeting surprise.

Audit-Ready, Year-Round

Fuel logs, pre-trip inspections, and technology inventory are compliance areas that previously depended on inconsistent paper tracking but are now documented continuously and exportable on demand. No end-of-year scramble. No more incomplete records.

Data That Changed What Happened Next

Intervention tracking revealed that students were getting support after poor assessment results, but rarely during the unit being taught. That single insight reshaped Dora's spring improvement plan and is now embedded in the district's state DASH plan as its primary data tool.