About

We write the documents nobody wants to start

The School Design Group builds practical tools for district and state leaders: policy templates, program design kits, planning frameworks, and the communication pieces that have to go out alongside them.

Why we exist

Most leadership work stalls in the same place. Not at the decision, and not at the implementation, but at the blank page in between. Someone has to produce a first draft, and producing it well takes a week that nobody has.

That draft is a solved problem. The structure of a defensible AI policy, a coherent program of study, a strategic plan a board will actually approve: these are known shapes. What varies is your context, your constraints, and the twenty or so decisions that are genuinely yours to make.

So we ship the shape, and we mark the decisions.

How we build

• Editable by default. Word and Excel. No locked PDFs, no watermarks, no per-seat activation. You bought it; use it.
• Contested points are named. Where practitioners genuinely disagree, we say so and explain what each option costs, rather than picking silently and hoping you don't notice.
• Jurisdiction-neutral. Federal frameworks are cited directly. Anything state-specific is a bracketed field, because a template that assumes one state is useless in forty-nine others.
• Written to survive scrutiny. The sections likeliest to be challenged get the most careful drafting, because those are the ones that matter when it counts.

Working with us directly

If you need something built for your context rather than adapted from a template, get in touch. We take a limited number of custom engagements.