First Bell is a school operations data firm for Texas charter networks and stand-alone charters. Attendance. Enrollment. PowerSchool. Dashboards. And the AI agents that keep all of it running after we leave.
Project-based builds and ongoing partnerships. Designed to ship in weeks, not quarters, because the AI agents we build alongside every engagement do the lift a human consultant alone cannot.
In Texas, every absent student is daily revenue lost. We build the systems that catch it. End-to-end attendance tracking that reconciles your SIS with TEA reporting, surfaces chronic absenteeism before it becomes a funding crisis, and produces TSDS PEIMS-ready exports on time, every cycle.
Enrollment is existential for charter schools. We build the systems that track it end to end. Intent to Return workflows that close the loop with every family, lottery and waitlist management, student placement logic across a network, and distance-to-goal dashboards that give leadership real-time visibility through open enrollment.
PowerSchool, DeansList, and the rest of the stack. We provide full SIS administration, scheduling rebuilds, plugin development, BigQuery pipelines, and state reporting configuration. If you've inherited a PowerSchool instance that nobody fully understands, we know exactly where to look.
Dashboards built for the principal reading them on a Tuesday morning, not for a data conference. Every dashboard starts with the question it needs to answer, not the data we have available. Looker Studio, Tableau, or embedded views in tools your team already uses.
Senior data and operations expertise on demand. For schools that need a partner for quick analyses, urgent compliance questions, system troubleshooting, or strategic guidance, our retainer gives you access without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Every engagement uses the five principles from The Everyday AI Playbook to embed AI into school operations, not bolt it on. Organization, automation, problem solving, research, and learning. Some deliverables become deployed agents. Most become prompt libraries your team uses every morning, governance your board signs off on, and AI fluency that compounds across the building after we leave.
First Bell is run by Rick Grant Jr., a sitting Chief Operating Officer at a Boston charter school and a doctoral candidate at Northeastern University. Not a former operator. Not a vendor with a product. Someone who is in the building right now.
The technical work, the agent stack, the state reporting expertise, all of it was built in service of running a real school. Every system First Bell ships has already run inside a charter school's operations. The question First Bell starts with is not "what data do you have." It is "what decision are you trying to make."
The work goes faster than what a one-person consulting shop can deliver because First Bell ships every engagement alongside the AI agents that keep it running. Attendance suites that take a competitor four weeks ship in ten days. Dashboards that elsewhere become abandoned tabs become operational tools your team uses every morning.
Rick is co-author of The Everyday AI Playbook, which lays out the five-principle framework First Bell uses with every client: organization, automation, problem solving, research, and learning. He is also the author of a Leadership Prompt Library in active production use by school leaders. The AI work First Bell ships is not experimental. It is documented, taught, and already running.
First Bell brings AI into school operations through a documented framework, not a sales pitch. The five principles from The Everyday AI Playbook map directly to the work charter schools do every day. Every engagement uses the framework. Some deliverables become agents. All of them become artifacts your team owns after we leave.
"The schools we work with don't need another vendor. They need a partner who has run the building, understands the data, and can ship the work before the next cycle starts." Rick Grant Jr., Founder
No discovery call theater. No sales deck. A direct conversation about what you are trying to solve and whether First Bell is the right partner for it.
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