MTSS for the schools that matter most
A complete student-success platform with a local AI assistant shaped by your teachers. Seven whole-child pillars. 788 evidence-based techniques. No cloud AI and no telemetry. Built to run on hardware your district already owns.
Atlas K-12 is a proactive, data-informed student support platform built around the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework. Designed for educators, counselors, administrators, and student support teams, Atlas K-12 brings your school's academic, behavioral, attendance, and social-emotional data together in one place so that every adult in the building can see the whole child, act on what the data shows, and ensure no student waits for support until it is too late.
Atlas K-12 is not a replacement for the systems your school already uses. It is the connective layer between them: a unified platform that speaks the language of MTSS, surfaces the right student information at the right time, and empowers your Student Support Teams to make data-based decisions with confidence.
MTSS is the gold standard for how schools address intervention and support, and Atlas K-12 is built to make that framework work for every student in your building, from Tier 1 universal instruction all the way through Tier 3 intensive, individualized support.
Every student. Every signal. One Care Team.
Atlas K-12 reads every academic, attendance, behavior, and social-emotional signal across your district, builds an intervention plan the moment a student needs one, surfaces it to a coordinated Care Team, tracks progress on the same screen, and updates every adult in the building in real time. No student waits. No teacher guesses. No system works alone.
Schools do not lack data. They lack a way to bring it all together. Atlas K-12 connects to the platforms your district already uses, no migrations, no learning curve, no disruption.
Built-in connectors follow each vendor's documented API and are in beta: none has yet run against a live district system, so test against your SIS test instance during evaluation (see the integration matrix). Systems without a public API use CSV or SFTP import, which works today. Every listed system also has a guided CSV / SFTP file-import path that works today, no adapter required. If your SIS isn't on either list, drop us a note and we will quote a custom adapter.
Atlas K-12: Where your data finally works together.
MTSS is a whole-child framework. These four pillars are calculated from your data. Since September 2026, three more pillars (Health & Basic Needs, Family & Community, and Future Readiness) are set by your student support team with a recorded reason, for seven in all. Every pillar is equally valid and equally important.
Universal screener scores, formative assessment trends, grade-level benchmark alignment, and progress monitoring trajectories. Supports traditional letter grades and standards-based grading.
Daily attendance tracking, chronic absenteeism identification at the 10 percent threshold, excused vs unexcused breakdown, and tardiness patterns.
Office discipline referral patterns, PBIS data, CICO participation. Surfaces support needs through a strengths-based lens, never used to label students.
Research-backed SEL screeners measuring grit, growth mindset, self-management, social awareness, self-efficacy, and emotion regulation.
Proactive support identification across the four data-fed pillars. Atlas K-12 continuously monitors academic performance, attendance, behavior, and social-emotional data to surface students who may benefit from additional support before gaps widen. Every student is assigned a tier status: Universal, Targeted, or Intensive, aligned directly to the MTSS framework. No waiting. No guessing. The right support signal, at the right time.
All students receive high-quality, evidence-based core instruction and universal behavioral support. Includes school-wide PBIS frameworks. Universal screening conducted at least three times per year.
Targeted, supplemental support delivered in small groups for students not yet demonstrating expected progress in Tier 1. Continuous progress monitoring over six to eight week intervention rounds.
Intensive, individualized intervention for students who have not demonstrated expected progress through Tier 2 supports. Coordinated by a Care Team with high-frequency progress monitoring.
Tier distribution based on the OSEP Center on PBIS and National Center on Intensive Intervention 80/15/5 model.
Every data point that matters for a student, in one place. Academic performance, attendance, behavior, social-emotional indicators, intervention plans, referrals, Care Team notes, and demographics. Connected directly to your existing systems.
Create Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention plans with goals, timelines, strategies, and progress monitoring. Goal graphs show if students are on pace. Champion assignment and documentation built in.
Research-backed social-emotional learning surveys for grades 3-5 and 6-12. Measures grit, growth mindset, self-management, social awareness, self-efficacy, and emotion regulation. Administer 1-3 times per year.
Educators can refer students for academic support, counseling, behavior intervention, or family outreach. Status tracking from submission through resolution.
Auto-generated student groups based on tier status, demographics, grade level, or custom filters. Target evidence-based interventions to the right students without manual sorting.
District and school-level views: chronic absenteeism rates, intervention effectiveness, behavior trends, strategic goal tracking. Disaggregate every report by demographics for equity analysis.
Built-in playbook of research-based intervention strategies organized by domain and tier. Select strategies directly into intervention plans. Add your own institution-specific strategies.
Any educator can add timestamped notes to a student profile. Tag by category: academic concern, behavior, family contact, meeting note. Shared across the student's support team.
Log incidents with type, severity, location, time, action taken, and follow-up. Track patterns over time. Percentage-based metrics give students room to improve.
Every dashboard, report, and chart can be filtered by race/ethnicity, gender, ELL status, IEP/504, free/reduced lunch, grade level, and school. Built for equity-focused decision making.
Daily attendance with chronic absenteeism alerts. Excused vs unexcused breakdown. Trend analysis by week, month, and term. Integrates with SIS data imports.
Every tier threshold is adjustable. Choose your grading system, set attendance cutoffs, define behavior incident thresholds, and customize SEL screener strength levels. Your district, your benchmarks.
Compass is an AI assistant built for your district and shaped by your teachers. It doesn't call OpenAI. It doesn't call Anthropic. It doesn't call Google. It runs entirely on the same server as the rest of Atlas K-12, powered by an open-source language model your district owns - and when your reviewers approve a teacher's correction, Compass uses it in future answers, so it reflects how your district actually does MTSS. The model itself is never trained on your data. The longer you use it, the more it sounds like the people in your buildings.
Not a generic chatbot. Compass is your district's AI - one that improves as your reviewers approve the corrections and "no, here's how we actually do it" notes your teachers leave behind. Click the glowing compass icon from a student profile and it already knows who you're looking at. Strategy mode pulls from your curated library; Navigator mode answers "how do I" questions about the software.
Atlas K-12 ships with a curated library of evidence-based pedagogical techniques drawn from IES, WWC, PBIS, CASEL, and NCII. Before your AI assistant suggests anything, your MTSS lead reviews every technique through a built-in wizard and decides which ones fit your district. Rejected techniques are filtered out of every recommendation, every draft, every retrieval.
Atlas K-12's main application process has no outbound network access - enforced in code at the Python socket layer - except Microsoft's sign-in service when a district turns on single sign-on. A separate, sandboxed resource fetcher process is the only other component permitted to make outbound requests, and its allowlist is restricted to eight public research organizations and the SIS hosts the district configures.
This is exactly what a third-grade teacher sees when they click the glowing compass icon and ask for help. Sources at the bottom are clickable in-app - every link drops the teacher straight into the full implementation packet for that strategy.
Real answer from Compass Lite (Phi-3 Mini), generated on an everyday $700 classroom PC - the same kind of machine sitting in most teacher workrooms today. That's the floor, not the ceiling. In a real district deployment, Atlas K-12 lives on dedicated server hardware in your IT closet, and every teacher, counselor, and administrator across the district logs in from any building (or from home over the district's secure connection) - one install, hundreds of users. On purpose-built server hardware, Compass Standard and Compass Pro deliver dramatically faster answers, richer reasoning, and structured tool calls. Same software, same private-by-design architecture - just the horsepower a full district deserves.
Sources pulled from the strategy library shipped with Atlas K-12 - IES, WWC, NCII, PBIS, CASEL, IRIS, Reading Rockets, and district extensions.
Compass runs on a local open-source language model. Atlas K-12 supports three tiers out of the box, all Western-origin, all running entirely on hardware your district owns. Pick the one that matches your hardware today - and when your hardware grows or your district outgrows the smaller model, swap to the next tier with a single config line. No data migration, no learning curve, no downtime beyond a server restart.
Lightweight assistant for evaluation, single-school pilots, or older hardware. Answers are grounded and useful but reasoning is shallow. Runs on 8 GB RAM.
The sweet spot for most US districts. Strong reasoning, structured tool calls, refuses out of scope cleanly, asks clarifying questions when unsure. Runs on 32 GB RAM.
For large districts or central servers. Near GPT-4 / Claude Sonnet quality at the local model tier. Best with a GPU for speed. Runs on 64-128 GB RAM.
Swap anytime. Every Compass tier uses the same prompt architecture, the same retrieval pipeline, the same correction-learning loop, and the same district-curated technique catalog. The only thing that changes between tiers is which open-source model file the runtime loads. Your data, your corrections, and your library carry over unchanged.
We're building an AI model of our own, trained from scratch specifically for K-12 education, to power the next version of Compass in Atlas K-12. Unlike general-purpose AI, it is built for one job: helping school teams choose, run and adjust Tier 1, 2 and 3 supports across the whole child, from academics and attendance to wellbeing, family and future readiness.
Every version is tested against the model Compass uses today and reviewed by educators before it ships. We'll share more as it gets closer.
Pick a vendor you are evaluating (Panorama, Branching Minds, eduCLIMBER, PowerSchool, Frontline, i-Ready) and see exactly where Atlas K-12 stacks up across 12 features. We are competitive on the work that matters at a fraction of the cost.
“Atlas K-12's main application process refuses outbound connections, enforced at the Python socket layer; the only exception is Microsoft's sign-in service when single sign-on is on. A separate fetcher process may reach only eight public research organizations and the SIS hosts we configure. Student data stays on the server except in features we turn on. No telemetry, no analytics, no hosted AI calls. Compass runs on-box and makes no network calls.”
You own the hardware. The AI runs on your server. We have zero variable cost per student, so we don't charge you one. Every Atlas K-12 license is a flat annual fee based on district size. No surprise invoices when enrollment grows. No "did we cross a tier" math at audit time. One number, one P.O.
A typical 5,000-student district paying Panorama at $10/student is writing a check for $50,000 a year. The same district on Atlas Mid District pricing pays $12,000 a year. That is $38,000 in annual savings - while keeping every student record on hardware your district owns.
Annual cost for a typical 5,000-student district. Competitor pricing comes from public school board agendas, RFP responses, and reseller quotes; vendors do not publish list prices, so all competitor numbers below are estimated ranges. Atlas K-12 numbers are exact.
Even at the cheapest competitor price ($25,000), Atlas K-12 Mid District pricing saves your district $13,000 a year while keeping every student record on hardware you own.
Mid-range Panorama at $50,000 vs Atlas Mid District at $12,000 = $38,000 saved per year, every year. Over a 5-year contract that is $190,000 back in your operating budget.
Pricing sources: Panorama and Branching Minds figures from publicly posted school board contract approvals (2023-2025); eduCLIMBER, Otus, and Kickboard ranges from RFP responses and reseller quotes. Vendor pricing changes; verify with each vendor before comparing. Atlas K-12 list prices are fixed and not subject to per-student multipliers.
Atlas K-12 installs once, on one server in your district's IT closet. The database, the AI, the strategy library, the student data - all in one place, on hardware your district owns. Every teacher in every building reaches that one server through whatever network setup your district already runs. We don't dictate your network - we work with it.
Most districts already run a private fiber, MPLS, or SD-WAN connecting every school back to a central data closet - the same network your SIS already runs on. Atlas installs there.
Rural, charter, and smaller districts often run each building on its own ISP with no private WAN tying them together. Atlas still gives you one shared install - you just pick how the buildings reach it.
Some districts - especially after a recent ransomware incident, or with unusually strict student data policies - want zero remote access of any kind. Atlas supports that too.
Whichever shape fits your district, the architecture is the same: your data lives on your server. Compass loads its model into RAM once, on that one server, and serves every teacher in every building from that one place. No syncing, no replicas, no "did the buildings get out of sync." We ship a deployment guide tailored to your network shape that your IT director follows once, on day one.
The Founder Partner program is closed. Existing Founder Partners keep their locked-in pricing and benefits for the life of their license. New districts license Atlas K-12 at the standard flat annual rates above. Questions about deployment or licensing? Email us.
Email Us →Atlas K-12 runs entirely on hardware your district owns. No cloud subscription, no monthly per-seat fee, and no data sent to us. The only outbound connections are the optional ones you turn on. Pick the tier that matches your district size and the AI horsepower you want behind Compass - you can upgrade later by swapping a single config line.
Single building, under 500 students. Compass runs in lightweight mode. Good for evaluation, MTSS team pilots, or a single-school deployment.
Multi-school district up to 5,000 students. Compass runs the recommended Mistral Small 3 24B model with full reasoning, tool calling, and self-critique. The sweet spot for most US districts.
Large districts (5,000+ students), multi-school servers, or districts that want the largest available local model. Compass runs Llama 3.3 70B with GPU offload for near-instant answers at scale.
Concrete CPU model numbers your IT director can take straight to a Dell, HP, or Lenovo configurator. Every CPU listed here has been benchmarked or tested with Compass at the named tier. RAM is always the gating factor; CPU determines how fast Compass answers, not whether it answers at all.
Almost any 6-core CPU made in the last five years runs Phi-3 Mini fluently. These are common district desktop spec sheets:
Mistral Small 3 24B is heavier. You want more cores AND fast single-thread performance. A workstation-class CPU pulls its weight here:
Llama 3.3 70B is a flagship-grade model. CPU-only is possible but a GPU is what makes Pro feel fast. These CPUs handle the rest of Atlas plus multi-user load:
Buying tip for IT directors: when you spec the box, don't undersize the RAM to save money on the CPU. The CPU determines how fast Compass replies; the RAM determines whether the model loads at all. A slower CPU with enough RAM still works. A faster CPU without enough RAM won't.
Fitted to Your District
Every district runs the same tested Atlas K-12 release, so every customer receives the same security fixes. What fits it to your district is configuration and data: your tier thresholds, pillars, strategies, and import mappings. Adapters for systems we do not support yet are available as a paid add-on.
Your district is one of a kind. Your platform should be too.
The full, code-verified list of controls, including what we have not built yet, is in the Trust Center. In short: Atlas K-12 is built around five categories of defense, every release is reviewed before it ships, and we are honest about what we have not built yet.
Atlas K-12 is designed around five categories of defense, in order of impact:
Every release goes through three layers of review before it ships:
Findings are tracked in a private security log and remediated before the release reaches founder partners. We treat every audit cycle as another chance to harden the platform.
We would rather build the controls than wave a sticker. Here is the honest list of what we have not done:
Compass AI privacy · Security & Architecture · Independent validation status · Review our Trust Center
Any vendor that tells you they have all of the above - regardless of company size - should be asked to produce the actual letter of attestation. Marketing pages are not evidence.
Atlas K-12 runs on hardware your district operates. That changes who owns which part of security. We are explicit about the division so your IT team and your CISO can match it to how they already run other on-premises platforms.
The full text of this division lives in Section 4A of our Data Processing Agreement, available to districts on request (see the Procurement Center). The plain-English public version is in our Who Owns What one-pager (PDF).
If your IT or data privacy team wants to see specific control documentation, the architecture diagram, or the test coverage report before signing on, email us. The architecture diagram and control list are public in the Trust Center; for anything else, such as test detail, email us.
Thank you to the founding cohort of districts that piloted Atlas K-12 during the build. Their feedback shaped the platform districts license today. Existing Founder Partners keep their locked-in pricing and benefits for the life of their license. New districts license Atlas K-12 at the standard flat annual rates published on this page. You still own the hardware, so we still never charge you for hosting.
Start a free 30-day evaluation on hardware your district controls: every feature unlocked, no credit card, no sales call. Your own team decides.
ashleyreddick@atlasoa.com
8112 Maryland Avenue, Suite 400 · Clayton, MO 63105
