Case study · Spring Garden Waldorf School
DASL and NAIS reporting
Every fall, independent schools report their numbers to DASL, the NAIS benchmarking survey: enrollment, admissions, tuition and aid, salaries, fundraising and more. For a small school it can mean weeks of admin staff digging through software systems, spreadsheets, and files. This fall, Spring Garden Waldorf School in Copley, Ohio, tried a different way.
8
staff hours
7.5
AI hours
Stress-free
DASL upload
DASL's answers live in several places at once: the books, the student information system, tuition and aid records, and the memories of a few people on staff. Pulling them together by hand can take days of colleague check-ins, searches, downloads, double checks, paper referencing, copy/paste, and data entry.
SageRock connected the school's books and student system with AI read-only access, so nothing in them could be changed. Then AI did the heavy lifting by filling the DASL template from those records and emailing the right staff members for any data outside the software systems. The business office reviewed the answers before they went in.
DASL answers were compiled with almost no manual data entry. The school went from multiple staff members logging in and filling in the DASL with their individual knowledge and data access to AI answering a majority of questions without needing humans. The questions software data didn't contain were filled and uploaded after emailing the right admin staff for answers. The fundraising section was built the same way, from QuickBooks and the school's donor records, and Spring Garden finalized its main DASL survey on October 12, four days before the deadline.
8 hours of the school's own time, plus about 7.5 hours of work from our AI assistant. No charge as it was our first DASL work for this case study. Time saved translated to asking AI for Board reports based on DASL information for an upcoming strategy planning session.
At a glance
The books and student system were connected to read, never to change.
Questions went straight to the person who knew the answer.
The business office checked every answer before it went to NAIS.