In a recent episode of The Table, I sat down with Pete Russell and Victoria Bush from August Schools, a platform built specifically for student support, health, and wellbeing in independent schools. Pete is a co-founder with a background in software and financial services at TPG Software, Cedar, and Bridgewater Associates. Victoria is a product manager who partners directly with schools to design tools that match how student support actually works on the ground. Together, they’re tackling one of the quietest but most consequential problems in K-12: the fragmentation of student information across the people who care for kids every day.
I’ve been working closely with the August team on building out features for student life professionals, and this conversation got at something I think every dean, division head, and head of school is grappling with right now. We have more touchpoints with students than ever before, but the information generated by those touchpoints rarely lives in one place. The cost of that fragmentation is higher than most schools realize.
The Notebook Problem Is Real
Pete opened with a story that I imagine will sound familiar to a lot of student life professionals. In one of his earliest conversations with an independent school, a dean of counseling described her June ritual: she kept a single spiral-bound notebook of every student interaction she’d had over the course of the year, chronologically. Each June, she would rip out all the pages and re-sort them by student so she could finally see who she’d actually been working with and what she’d done.
That counselor isn’t an outlier. She’s the rule. Pete described walking into schools and finding “a little bit of paper, a lot of Google Drive, a lot of informal processes happening in email.” Victoria added that most schools she works with have already done the hard intellectual work of designing thoughtful processes for student support. What they lack are tools that let them actually execute those processes consistently across an entire team.
This is an important distinction. The gap in most independent schools isn’t a thinking gap. It’s an infrastructure gap.
What “Continuity of Care” Actually Means in a School
One framework from this conversation that I think is worth holding onto is Pete’s concept of continuity of care across two axes.
The first is longitudinal continuity. A student moves from lower school to middle school to upper school. They build trust with a counselor. They share their story. Then they age out of that division and, in too many schools, the handoff happens from square zero. The new counselor inherits a name, not context. The student is asked to rebuild trust from scratch with someone who has no idea what they’ve already disclosed.
The second is continuity across teams. The example Pete used here is the one that stuck with me most. A student keeps showing up to the school nurse’s office with a stomachache that mysteriously appears only during the class period where they feel most academically challenged. The nurse has a signal. The learning specialist has a signal. The advisor has a signal. The dean has a signal. But none of them are looking at the same picture, so no one sees the pattern.
Pete put it plainly: “The cost is churn. The cost is kids not feeling heard. The cost is kids slowly disenrolling.”
The Hidden Revenue Cost of Disconnected Information
This is where the conversation got particularly relevant for heads of school and board members. August has been doing early analysis of student data, and Pete shared an interesting finding: students who leave campus during the day (not full-day absences, but partial-day departures) are among the strongest predictors of eventual disenrollment. A student finding reasons to flee campus is sending a signal long before they actually leave the school.
If no one in the building is connecting that pattern to the conversations happening in the counseling office, the visits to the nurse, or the soft conduct flags from a teacher, that signal stays invisible until the family is on a tour at another school.
For tuition-dependent institutions, this is not a soft cost. Retention math in independent schools is brutal, and the operational case for connected student support infrastructure is, in my view, undersold.
“Connection Before Correction”
One of the phrases I find myself saying constantly in my consulting work is “connection before correction.” If you don’t know what a kid is carrying, you can’t correct their behavior in a way that’s actually proportionate or useful. You’re either too heavy-handed or not engaged enough.
This is where I think the case for connected student support infrastructure becomes most compelling for student life professionals specifically. When a behavioral incident happens, the dean who has access to the broader picture (without violating any clinical confidentiality) can respond with context. They know this student has been seeing the learning specialist five times a month. They don’t see the clinical notes, but they see the engagement metadata. That changes the conversation entirely.
Victoria described a division head in California who, before adopting connected infrastructure, would spend hours chasing down counselors, learning specialists, nurses, and teachers whenever an incident occurred involving a single student. That time has a real cost, and so does the lag between the incident and the response.
The Privacy Question Independent Schools Keep Getting Wrong
I want to spend a moment on something Pete said that I think is genuinely under-discussed in independent school circles. There’s significant skepticism among school counselors about electronic health record systems, often framed as a way to protect student privacy. Pete’s pushback is one I’ve been making for years in my own consulting work: most of that skepticism is tradition masquerading as tech aversion.
A few facts worth sitting with:
- Most independent schools are not actually FERPA-regulated, because they don’t take federal funding.
- They’re not HIPAA-regulated providers unless they’re billing insurance.
- The “if I don’t write it down, no one can subpoena it” theory of documentation is, legally speaking, a much weaker shield than people believe.
Pete shared a piece of advice that I’m going to be quoting for a long time: when you’re documenting, imagine a parent looking over your left shoulder and a lawyer looking over your right shoulder. That’s the standard. The schools that get pulled into messy legal situations are almost never the ones with formal, consistent documentation. They’re the ones reconstructing notes after the fact from Post-its and memory.
For student life professionals specifically, the legal exposure is less about HIPAA and FERPA and more about consistency of process. When a parent contests a disciplinary outcome, the question that matters is: did the institution follow its own stated policy? If you can point to a documented ten-step process and a record of every serious case being handled the same way, you’re in a fundamentally different position than a school relying on institutional memory.
Building Technology That Serves the Relationship
The skepticism I hear most often about adopting any new platform in a school setting is the fear that technology will replace the relational work that defines good student support. This is a fair concern, and I pushed Pete and Victoria on it directly.
Pete’s response was that they intentionally built August against the prevailing 2021 EdTech trend, which was trying to telehealth and chatbot the relational work out of schools entirely. August’s design philosophy is the opposite: build tools that strip away the administrative drag (chasing information, hunting for context, rebuilding pictures from fragments) so that the adults in the building have more energy to be present with kids. Pete called it “a physical game” that you can’t abstract away from.
I think that framing matters. The question isn’t whether technology has a role in student support. It’s whether the technology is designed to enable connection or to substitute for it.
What Public Schools Are Teaching Independent Schools
One of the more interesting threads in our conversation was Pete’s observation that he’s seeing constructs he previously associated only with public school districts (multi-tiered systems of support, data-driven intervention frameworks, more formalized processes) filter into the independent school world. He expected innovation to flow primarily from independent to public. He’s seeing it move both ways.
I think this is worth flagging for independent school leaders. The narrative that highly-resourced independent schools can rely on heroics (“we know our kids; nothing falls through the cracks”) is increasingly difficult to defend. Public districts operating at scale have been forced to build systems that catch things, and many of those systems are now genuinely worth borrowing from.
What Schools Get in Year One Versus Year Two
For administrators wondering what implementation actually looks like, Victoria framed the timeline clearly. The immediate value is alignment: having learning specialists, counselors, nurses, athletic trainers, deans, and division heads operate within a shared process rather than a patchwork of Google Docs, paper notebooks, and email threads. That’s a forcing function that pays off quickly.
The deeper value shows up in year two, when schools start seeing structured data they’ve never had access to before. Victoria described one director of counseling who always sensed that more girls than boys were coming to her office. Once the data was visualized, the split turned out to be 80/20. That single piece of information prompted a new initiative where counselors went out to sports practices to talk about resilience with athletes, and the ratio began to shift.
This is the kind of insight you can’t get from a notebook ripped apart in June.
The Attendance Problem That Wasn’t a Problem
One product area Pete and Victoria flagged as particularly relevant right now is attendance. Pre-pandemic, attendance was not a meaningful issue for most independent schools. It is now. The August team has built workflows that send proactive, supportive notifications to families when patterns emerge (for instance, when a student has missed five algebra classes), framed not as punitive but as community-building.
Pete’s framing here is exactly right: “It’s not just ‘you missed and you got a smack.’ It’s ‘you missed, and here are all the different ways we’re here to pull you back into our community and make sure you know you belong.'”
That’s the difference between an attendance policy and an attendance philosophy. Schools serious about belonging need to think about which one they’re operating with.
What This Means for Your School
If you’re a head of school, dean, or division director listening to this and wondering where to start, here’s what I’d offer based on this conversation:
- Audit where student information currently lives. Be honest. Notebooks, Google Drive folders, individual inboxes, sticky notes, and memory. Map it.
- Identify the handoffs that fail most often. Division transitions, counselor turnover, advisor reassignments. These are where students get reintroduced as strangers.
- Examine your documentation practices through the “parent and lawyer over the shoulder” lens. If your discipline records can’t withstand a consistent-process challenge, the risk is real.
- Resist the false choice between connection and infrastructure. The schools doing this well aren’t choosing between relationships and systems. They’re using systems to protect the time and energy required for relationships.
I’ll close with the question Pete and Victoria left me thinking about. We tend to talk about belonging as a culture problem and student support as a staffing problem. But belonging and support both live or die at the level of information flow. A student who is fully known by the village around them feels held. A student whose story is scattered across eight inboxes does not. The infrastructure isn’t separate from the relational work. It’s what makes the relational work possible at scale.
You can learn more about August Schools at augustschools.com, and reach Pete and Victoria directly through their site if you’re interested in seeing how this might work in your own community.
