MTSS for the schools that matter most
A complete student-success platform with a local AI assistant trained by your teachers. Four whole-child pillars. 788 evidence-based techniques. Zero outbound network calls. 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 retraining, no disruption.
Atlas K-12: Where your data finally works together.
MTSS is a whole-child framework. 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 all four 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 trained 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 every time a teacher corrects an answer or marks one as exactly right, Compass learns how your district actually does MTSS. 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 gets smarter every week from the corrections, thumbs-ups, 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 zero outbound network access - enforced in code at the Python socket layer. A separate, sandboxed resource fetcher process is the only component permitted to make outbound requests, and its allowlist is restricted to eight public research hostnames.
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 retraining, 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.
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 has no outbound network access whatsoever, enforced at the Python socket layer. A separate fetcher process is the only component permitted outbound, restricted to eight public research hostnames by three independent mechanisms. Student data never leaves the server. No telemetry, no analytics, no hosted AI calls. The local AI assistant runs on-box and has no network access at all.”
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., locked in forever as a founder partner.
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 Founder pricing pays $6,000 a year. That is $44,000 in annual savings - while keeping every student record on hardware your district owns.
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.
Because you own the server, we never have to charge you for hosting. As a founder partner, your first full year of Atlas K-12 is free after development testing wraps, and your district locks in founder pricing for life on every year after that. The lowest rate we will ever offer goes to the districts who help us build it.
See the Full Founder Offer →Atlas K-12 runs entirely on hardware your district owns. No cloud subscription, no monthly per-seat fee, no outbound data flows. 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-tenant 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.
No Two Atlas Builds Are Alike
Atlas is not one platform shipped to every school. When your district signs on, we write the underlying code to fit your data, your systems, and your workflow. The features look the same. The dashboards look the same. The MTSS framework is the same. But the engine running underneath is built specifically for how your district operates. No two Atlas installations are identical.
Your district is one of a kind. Your platform should be too.
Atlas K-12 is in active development and we are seeking school districts willing to pilot the platform during the build process. Your feedback shapes the product. You get early access to every feature as it's built, direct input on what gets prioritized, and when the platform launches you get the founder partner package: a free first year of Atlas K-12 after development testing wraps, plus founder pricing locked in permanently for every year after that.
The trade is simple. You own the hardware, so we never have to charge you for hosting. You give us feedback during the build, so we never have to guess what districts actually need. You launch with us, so you get the lowest price we will ever offer.
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