Carroll County Board hears annual report and launches interactive performance dashboard; 24 Strong Foundation pledges major support

At its September board meeting, the Carroll County Board of Education received the district’s 2025 annual report and a demonstration of a new interactive performance dashboard intended to make student and financial data easier for the public to find and understand. Superintendent Scott Cowart introduced the dashboard and said it was developed after conversations about House Bill 581 and will allow drilldowns by school and topic.

"We've got something that nobody else in the state of Georgia has," Superintendent Scott Cowart said as he demonstrated the dashboard’s landing page, headline indicators and drilldown features. Cowart told the board the dashboard will "go live tomorrow morning," giving the public immediate access via the district website and a QR code printed in the annual report. The dashboard includes tabs for academic achievement, human-resources and finance pages that show metrics such as reading-on-grade-level, graduation rate, staff-demographic trends and fund-equity measures; staff said many charts can be filtered by individual school.

Charity Aaron, a district staff member who presented the annual report, described the report’s highlights and noted the performance dashboard is linked from the back cover and available electronically. Aaron reported that last year donor-supported work tied to the 24 Strong Foundation totaled approximately $450,000. Superintendent Cowart and other board members described early indications that the foundation’s support in the current year "will be well over a million dollars," a projection offered during the meeting and characterized by participants as an estimate rather than a finalized accounting.

Cowart recognized three staff members for leading the dashboard project—Sabrina Collins (HR/Qualtrics work), Keri Terry (data work) and Ben Chambers (design/visualization)—and invited questions from the board. Board members said the tool will help them answer community questions with written data rather than ad-hoc replies, and staff confirmed print copies of the annual report and QR codes linking to the dashboard will be made available at upcoming community conversations.

Why it matters: the dashboard centralizes district data and adds explanatory context intended to make metrics easier for parents, staff and community leaders to interpret. Board members said the tool could streamline responses to public inquiries and support classroom- and school-level outreach.

Next steps: the district said the dashboard would be publicly accessible starting the morning after the board meeting and staff will provide print copies of the annual report and a QR code at community conversation events scheduled across the county.