Skip the RFP

In our house, we celebrate the spirit of DIY (or at least I do, maybe Wesley less so). I’ve painted bathrooms, hung gallery walls, and put up peel-and-stick wallpaper. But I’ve also learned that the willingness to DIY is entirely relative to the project and the homeowner.

I know my boundaries. If a project is indoors and doesn’t involve major electrical or plumbing, I’m in. But if it’s outside? Landscaping or heavy exterior work? Absolutely not. We call the professionals. (There is a reason my school partners with a catering company rather than trying to run an in-house kitchen).

Knowing when to pick up the tools and when to call the contractor is the ultimate test of homeownership. Increasingly, it is the ultimate test of school leadership.

For decades, independent schools have believed that when it comes to technology and data, we are entirely dependent on external contractors. When an operational system breaks, our administrative reflex is to write a $15,000 annual check for another mass-market software subscription. We spend months forcing our unique school cultures to bend to a rigid, external codebase—using 20% of the features we pay for while fighting the 80% we actually need.

But the emergence of low-code platforms and responsive AI has changed the calculus of the school-board version of DIY. It has given us the power to look at our most frustrating operational challenges and say: We can build a better version of this ourselves.

Taking on a strategic DIY project doesn't require a computer science degree. It just takes a willingness to explore, a clear problem, and the right tools.

A few weeks ago, we faced a facilities emergency at school. A duct smoke detector error threw our commercial fire alarm panel into a hard lockdown, automatically shutting off the building's HVAC. It was June. In Alabama.

With no technician available and the building temperature climbing, how did I figure out that I needed to climb up to the third-floor science lab, access the physical duct housing box, take apart the sensor, and perform a manual sequence to reset the airflow?

My good friend Google Gemini. I didn't need to be a certified fire safety engineer; I needed to be an adaptive problem solver with a responsive tool in my hand.

The exact same logic applies to our school's data systems.

When we struggled with a laggy, commercial attendance system that failed to bridge the gap between classroom teachers (who need longitudinal student data) and the front office (who need real-time safety threshold data), we didn't search for a new vendor. I used an AI-assisted, low-code platform to spend an afternoon building a custom, two-layered attendance hub that handles both.

Once those two layers could talk, the systemic dominoes fell quickly. If we knew who was in the building, emergency protocols belonged in the same place. So we built in crisis management. Next came carpool—our commercial dismissal app did 80% of the job, but if an administrator accidentally announced a car out of order, you couldn't re-sort the queue. We built a custom module to fix that exact daily friction point.

Soon, faculty PTO, lunch orders, and daily scheduling all dissolved into a single, unified home: our own school hub.

This year, we are taking the ultimate leap: piloting our own custom, in-house Learning Management System (LMS). (To be completely transparent: we are piloting all of this right now, and I don’t know for sure that it will all work!)

But because this space is a Work in Draft, I'm entirely comfortable with that uncertainty. True innovation isn’t the deployment of a flawless, static product. Innovation is the intentional disruption of the habits of an organization—and the messy, iterative reconstruction that follows.

Sure, there is a financial benefit to saving tens of thousands of dollars on software licensing fees. But the real game-changer is the shift in organizational agency.

When a teacher identifies a workflow bug in a commercial LMS, the tech director files a support ticket and gets a polite, generic response about next year's roadmap. When you possess data autonomy, that conversation disappears. If a teacher points out a clunky step in our system this semester, we don’t file a ticket. We modify the codebase that afternoon.

We don't need to outsource every single problem to an expensive contractor. Sometimes, the most resilient, adaptive thing a school leader (or homeowner) can do is pick up the digital (or literal) paint brush, trust the tools at hand, and start building.