Bell the Bull — Detecting Risk Earlier, Acting with Confidence
District planning was fragmented across spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected dashboards — leaving leaders unable to see execution, and schools duplicating work with no shared source of truth.
Role
Lead UX Designer & Researcher
Timeline
12 weeks · five-phase research & design engagement · 2025
Team
2 Designers, 2 Researchers, 1 Product Lead, 1 Program Sponsor, 1 Executive Sponsor
Primary metric
78% ↑ planning efficiency · $1.2M annualized savings
OVERVIEW
The snapshot
Challenge
42 schools across the district planned independently, with only 42% cross-school visibility, 74% of planning work happening outside any shared system, and reporting alone consuming 18 hours per administrator every week.
Approach
Ran a 12-week, five-phase research engagement — Discover, Analyze, Synthesize, Validate, Align & Plan — with 96 participants across district leadership, principals, curriculum teams, and teachers, combining 56 interviews, 5 workshops, and a review of 120+ planning documents to map the full district planning lifecycle.
Result
Unified goal-setting, curriculum alignment, execution, reporting, and intervention into one connected platform, lifting planning efficiency from 46% to 82% and cutting weekly reporting effort from 18 hours to 6.
HERO METRIC
78%
Improvement in planning efficiency
PROBLEM
What was breaking
A compliance workflow so confusing, 1 in 3 users abandoned it mid-form.
A compliance workflow so confusing, 1 in 3 users abandoned it mid-form.
Struggling schools waited 4-6 weeks between an issue emerging and support arriving, since intervention depended on manual, after-the-fact reporting
This wasn't a reporting problem. It was an alignment problem.
DISCOVERY
How I learned it
Discover — stakeholder interviews & current-state mapping
Analyze — workflow, governance & information-flow mapping
Synthesize — insight generation & opportunity mapping
Validate — findings review & prioritization with district leaders
Ownership is ambiguous — no one is clearly accountable for closing the loop
Found in governance mapping & workshop synthesis
Planning happens in silos, with every school inventing its own format
Found in 56 stakeholder interviews across 4 districts
Reporting consumes hours but delivers limited strategic value
Found in document review & reporting process analysis
INSIGHTS
The moments things clicked
Fragmented planning is the root cause, not the symptom
Schools build plans independently, in inconsistent formats and disconnected tools, so nothing rolls up into a shared district picture.
Leaders can't see execution until it's already a problem
With only 42% cross-school visibility, district leaders learn about at-risk schools weeks after issues emerge, not while there's still time to act.
Manual reporting crowds out the time it's meant to protect
Administrators spend up to 18 hours a week compiling updates by hand, time pulled directly from instructional leadership and support.
STRATEGY
How I chose what to build
One plan, one system
Replace the patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and standalone dashboards with a single connected planning system every role can trust.
Visibility without surveillance
Give leaders real-time insight into progress and risk, while keeping ownership and context with the people doing the work.
Governance and role-based access by default
Every role sees exactly what it needs to act on — from district-wide oversight to classroom-level detail — with clear decision rights at every gate.
THE TRADE OFF
The connected planning lifecycle and role-based visibility were our highest-leverage bets — they attacked fragmentation and blind spots directly, the two root causes behind every other symptom we found. Automated reporting and early-warning intervention followed once district leaders and principals trusted the underlying data.
SOLUTION
The final shape of things
1
Escalation, not email chains
A structured, timed escalation pipeline routes every incident from AI detection through human validation, counselor review, and parent notification — cutting average escalation time and giving every stakeholder a clear next action.
2
Signals caught on the wrist, not after the fact
Wearable check-ins surface potential distress in real time — heart rate, voice stress, and risk level — and let a student report an incident in one tap, closing the gap between a signal and a response.
3
Parents see status, not silence
A dedicated parent portal shows safety score, active alerts, and intervention progress in real time, replacing the 68% of parents who previously didn't know how to get help.
IMPACT
What actually shifted
78%
Planning efficiency (46% to 82%)
66%
Weekly reporting time (18 to 6 hrs)
138%
Cross-school visibility (42% to 100%)
67%
Intervention speed (4-6 wks to 1-2 wks)
BEFORE
2.6 days average time from signal to intervention
18 hrs/week spent on reporting
42% cross-school visibility
AFTER
1h 24m average time from signal to intervention
6 hrs/week spent on reporting
100% cross-school visibility
Bell the Bull has given us the ability to see what we couldn't before — and act when it matters most.
Curious how this could apply to your system?
REFLECTION
What I'd carry forward
What I'd do differently
I'd pressure-test the governance model with principals and teachers earlier — the planning hierarchy looked clean from the district office, but ownership at the school and classroom level took more iteration than we scoped for.
What this taught me
The recurring theme across every stakeholder group was the same: teams weren't lacking effort, they were lacking a shared system. Once planning, execution, and reporting lived in one place with clear ownership, alignment followed.